


Mantle and Drum

by story_monger



Series: Triptych [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fem Castiel - Freeform, Fem Dean, Fem Sam, Gen, Team Free Will, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 00:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2903354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean dreams of deep forests and trees with human voices inside them and an angel hovering at the edge. It's getting hard to leave that place. </p><p>Sequel to Gold and Light</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mantle and Drum

She saw two hands.

Two different hands, entangled in a mess of fingers and grime. They gripped with staunch cords of tendon and muscle. In slow motion, she watched one of them disintegrate into blood and flesh. The other slipped away and disappeared into a place that looked dark and forbidden, save a bar of blue sky.

She tries to say something.

Something stirs; she’s not sure where or who. Dean finds herself in that place just below waking and above sleeping. When she oozes into consciousness, it’s disorienting and feels like dreaming.

She’s not wearing jeans, but flannel pajama bottoms. That and a t-shirt two sizes too large, with no bra beneath. When she opens her eyes, Dean finds wan yellow light throwing the shadow of her shoulder and hip into sharp relief against patterned wallpaper.

She breathes for several minutes before twisting around under the covers. When she stills again, she finds a figure hunched at the table at the far side of the room, yellow light glinting off loose strands of hair and leaving eldritch shadows across her face. Dean considers that this is exactly how dad used to look—sans the ponytail—when Dean woke up at three in the morning with a sweaty, chubby Sammy glomped to her side and trucks downshifting on the highway.

Sam must not have heard Dean moving, or heard her and assumed she was only shifting in her sleep, because she digs one hand deeper into her hair and flips a page of a book. Sam does that. Digs into her hair when she’s researching. Like she’s trying to coax her brain into higher power. Or just needs something to fiddle with to concentrate. Dean’s never asked.

Dean extends her legs as far as she can and lets her pajamas ride up to mid-calf. She can feel where the sheets are tucked under the mattress at the foot of the bed.

She considers making some noise to draw Sam’s attention, then decides against it because that would break Sam’s concentration and earn herself a scolding to go back to sleep. Besides, she’s still sinfully warm and slow, and the prospect of demons or vampires or whatever bursting into this room seems laughably distant. Dean actually smiles because she’s thinking again about how, when she used to wake up to find dad researching, she’d usually been able to fall back asleep because it was _dad_ and the yellow lamp light always felt unobtrusively present, like it had a motherly energy.

Dean can appreciate that she’s only able to entertain these kinds of thoughts because she’s still caught up in the syrupy state of waking up slowly and having nothing to do but continue to lie there. It’s a luxury.

Dean’s asleep again within minutes, and lands herself right back into Purgatory.

***

She and Benny had fought off a pack of what used to be werewolves not an hour ago. Dean could still smell them on her spattered jacket and hands when they settled themselves at the base of a massive oak. Cries of who-knew-what sounded from over far rivers and hills, but the creatures couldn’t reach them with any immediacy, and it was the closest to the idea of “safe” Dean ever felt in that place.

She wandered a little ways from the oak to collect kindling for a fire, though not because it was going to scare anything away or warm her body. (Because this place didn’t follow the normal rules of thermodynamics, not really, not at all.)

“I like fires,” she defended herself as she dumped the kindling near where Benny was checking over his equipment. “They’re nice to stare at. Going into zen mode.”

“I didn’t say a thing,” Benny protested, glancing up.

“Dude, I could hear you thinking it.” It wasn’t so hard. Sam used to do the same thing.

Benny shifted on his seat, then set his blade down.

“I’m just not sure,” he said in a careful voice, “why you go to the trouble for a fire when you’re…” and here he trailed off, looking half confused and half embarrassed.

“I’m so smoking, right?” Dean popped her hip and grinned. Benny huffed a distracted laugh.

“I’ve told you this, though, right?” he pursued, and Dean stood straight again, a knob of wood still dangling from one hand. “That you burn here? All human and alive like you are? Sometimes it hurts to look right at you.”

Dean remained still, almost self-consciously so.

“You’ve told me,” she said. She hadn’t thought of it since then. “Do I feel like a fire to you?”

“Sister, it’s been ages since I’ve felt a fire as a human feels it,” Benny told her. “I’m just sayin’…” he sighed, rubbed a hand across his chin. “I remember what a fire…entailed. And in that sense, yeah. You’re practically an inferno.”

Dean tapped the knot of wood against her calf and looked down at the pile of kindling she already had ready to go.

“What about Castiel?” she asked.

Where was Cas?

“She burns completely differently,” Benny assured her. “She burns cold. Angels ain’t humans.”

Had Cas even been with them at that point? Dean couldn’t remember and anyway, her hand is a wreck again and it’s cold—

Dean wakes up to feel something moving across the space where fingers used to live. It takes a moment to register the shape of the intruding hands and the cadence of the breath. Sam pauses when Dean hikes her knees up to her chest and releases a low-decibel groan.

“Sorry.” Sam’s voice comes husky with disuse. Dean wonders how long it’s been since Sam insisted she go to bed. Things come to her more clearly this time around. The light filtering through the curtains has a tone of 7 or 8 a.m. Damn. Dean probably got more sleep in one night than she does in the standard week.

“Did you drug me?” she asks.

Sam’s laugh is like sandpaper. She finishes spreading the ointment. “No, I didn’t.”

“I feel like someone replaced my muscles with jelly.”

“It’s called exhaustion,” Sam tells her, all business.

Dean tries to envision what’s making her exhausted and comes up blank. She’s not driving these days. Hunts have been nonexistent since that witch coven, what, two weeks ago? They’re investing all that energy into research these days, spending more time in libraries than graveyards. She should be bursting with energy and instead she’s sleeping for nine hours straight.

Sam begins wrapping her hand in fresh bandages. The movements are sure and steady, but that might just be because Sam’s been doing it for so long.

“This’s the last time I have to do this, by the way,” Sam tells her. “Congratulations.”

“What?” Dean sits all the way up, and Sam makes a grunt when Dean’s hand bobs. “Really?”

“According to the last doctor’s appointment you had, at least,” Sam adds. “That and the ointment is basically gone.” Dean ignores the note of combativeness in her sister’s voice.

“Well damn.” Dean crosses her legs and stabilizes her arm against her knee for Sam. “Kudos to you, Sammy. You could probably be a nurse at this point.”

“Nah. Who’d want to trade a life of irregular hours, death and blood for one of—oh wait.”

Sam flashes a glance at Dean, hazel eyes bright, as Dean snorts.

“Speaking of irregular hours. Did _you_ sleep at all?” Dean asks. Sam finishes the bandage with perfunctory motion then straightens. She has one bent leg hitched up on the bed, the other planted on the floor.

“No,” Sam says after a moment. “But I think I got something out of it.”

“Yeah?” Dean leans back and tries to keep her voice casual. “Like what?”

Sam glances at the bed. Her hair is in a poor excuse for a ponytail at this point. Dean wonders how many times Sam yanked her hand from her hair, only to bury it there a minute later.

“A few references to texts that might get into further details about…um, how to access Purgatory. Nothing about angels though.”

“Just references.”

“Yeah.”

Dean considers that at this point she might be inclined to give some subtle reminder that this devotion to researching the ins and outs of Purgatory didn’t seem to come together a few months ago, when it was Dean who needed it. She can see Sam watching her, waiting for it.

But Dean’s still too warm and well-rested to start something this early. She scoots forward and looks for her socks.

“We’ll grab some coffee and see where to go next,” she says. Sam’s relief and guilt is a taste in the air.

And then Dean wishes abruptly Sam was still across the room reading and she was still under the covers, her own heat radiating at her from every side.

***

Helena, Montana isn’t the kind of place that looks like it has any connection to Purgatory to speak of, but Dean’s taking Sam’s word that the private Catholic university down the street has a impressive collection of ancient manuscripts.

“Some good titles are listed in their database, at least,” Sam says as they idle at a red light. “Maybe we can get the curator and pick their brains.” Dean makes a noncommittal noise and ignores the look Sam tosses in her direction.

The religion department’s special collection room is a small gray one with a bored looking student sitting at a metal desk. She glances up as Sam and Dean come in, their shoes squeaking against the linoleum.

“Hi,” Sam grins. Her ponytail is back in place and it bobs convincingly. The dark circles under her eyes and slight swaying, Dean has to admit, give credence to the college student persona. “I’m looking for a few books here?”

“Yup,” the student scoots her laptop to the side and poises her hands over the desktop computer’s keyboard. “You have a title?” Dean zones out as Sam pulls a slip of paper with book titles from her jacket pocket, along with a hastily made fake student ID. She’s keeping her right hand firmly in her pocket, because she can just imagine the student asking in a high voice what happened, or even worse, staying quiet and giving it quick looks.

Dean pulls her jacket closer around her with her free hand.

“Be right back,” the student says, and disappears into the back room. Sam rocks back on her heels and gives a jaw-cracking yawn.

“Why are we doing this now?” Dean asks. “You should have caught a few hours of sleep.” Sam gives a dry laugh.

“Okay mom.”

“I’m serious.” Dean slaps Sam’s upper arm with a dull _fwap_.

“I’ve had worse.”

“Yeah good.”

“I’ve seen _you_ this tired, and tipsy to boot, and still going after chupacabras,” Sam says.

“That,” Dean lifts her chin, “is an exaggeration.”

“No, not really.”

The student reemerges from the back room and Dean settles for kicking her sister in the calf. To her credit, Sam accepts the books and two pairs of cotton gloves with only a mild grimace at the corner of her mouth, and gets Dean back by casually treading on her toes.

They set up camp in a far corner of the room, at one of the little particleboard cubicle-desks. Sam’s knees bump at the underside of the table as she scoots her chair forward.

“I figured we could just skim through,” Sam tosses Dean a pair of gloves. “See if anything looks interesting.”

Dean nods as she starts coaxing a glove over her right hand. The bandages add bulk and friction, and Dean has to tug the cotton methodically.

Several seconds later, Dean examines the three fingers standing at attention and the two slackers flopped across her hand. Dean glances up and realizes that Sam is watching.

Something flicks across Sam’s face too quickly to register when she catches Dean’s eye. Then she hands a book from the top of the stack over to Dean.

“Let me know if any of the descriptions of Purgatory look familiar,” she says.

“Another day another dollar,” Dean quips back.

Dean accepts her book, a heavy, red, mold-smelling thing, and cracks the yellowed pages open. Across from the table of contents, she finds a print of some grotesque creature—are those tentacles? Dean thinks they might be tentacles— that looks like nothing _she’s_ ever seen.

 _Demon most evil,_ the caption below states. Demons wouldn’t be so obvious. They’re usually more about subtlety. Earth-side, that is. Once they have you in Hell—well.

Dean studies the Table of Contents, doesn’t find anything that screams “Is your Angel of the Lord stuck in Purgatory? Here’s how to get her out!” and clumsily flips to the first page using what she can of the fingers on her right hand. They still don’t respond to her very well, can’t handle delicate tasks like typing unless she chicken pecks. At this point she’s still using her right hand as a broad club rather than a detail-oriented tool. Which is fine. She’ll figure it out.

The book is dry reading. Guys from the 18th century, Dean has found, have a remarkable capacity for turning even the most gut-wrenching supernatural account into something about as riveting as a tax return form. Dean starts skimming faster and faster, soon moving through whole chapters if the first few sentences don’t include the word “Purgatory” or “angels.”

Then, a little more than halfway through, she pauses when she finds another print illustration. This one features two harpies munching on some poor sap’s intestines while he flails ineffectually. The chapter title says, “On Monsters.”

Well, it’s something.

Dean hunches her shoulders as she starts reading, and is pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of some of the entries. Maybe this guy actually saw a few of these bitches instead of recreating rumors.

“ _Monsters rarely if ever return from a true and proper death,_ ” the text reads. “ _It takes a strong mentality and intent to will a creature back into the living. It can be done with the proper combination of souls and abilities,”_ —what the hell is that supposed to mean?—“ _and has rarely if ever been recorded._ ”

It starts talking about zombies.

Well. Dean leans back in her chair and tips the front legs off the ground. She rubs her fingers into her eyes before staring at the ceiling through blurred corneas.

Would Cas follow the same rules as a monster? she wonders. She’s an angel, yeah, but a lot of other things too. Had been full of Purgatory souls for a while. Full of Leviathan. Had been nearly human back during the Apocalypse. And come to think of that, what do you call a Graceless angel? Would the cosmic order call it a monster? Lucifer had become the devil but he was also still an angel so—

“Sammy,” Dean asks the ceiling. “D’you think a Graceless angel is technically human?”

“Sam—“

Dean cuts herself off, then lets her chair return to all four legs in a clatter. Sam grunts, but doesn’t stop her drooling on a hundred-year-old text with her ponytail all but decimated. Dean considers the scene, fumbles for her phone, and takes a picture.

After that, she contemplates jiggling Sam’s shoulder, but the kid looks downright cute with her cheek squashed up against the book. After a moment, Dean pries the book out from under Sam’s face and sets it on top of the pile to dry. She returns to peer at Sam, scanning the deep purple beneath her eyes and the way her skin is too pale.

(She’ll be too scared to ask later, so Dean instead watches Sam’s eyelids, as if they’ll hint at the presence of an angel in Sam’s dreams.)

“Damn it,” Dean mutters to no one in particular. She reaches out to brush a strand of hair away from her sister’s nose, bites the inside of her cheek, then abruptly props her boots up on the desk—since no one can yell at her for it now—to finish skimming her book.

Dean has plowed through three books, watched a cute guy in an AC/DC shirt take the girl’s place, and seriously considered flirting with him just to break the boredom when Sam wakes with a strangled grunt.

Dean’s boots fall to the ground and she watches as Sam blinks at the fluorescent lights.

“Whu…” Sam’s eyes land on Dean.

“Morning gorgeous,” Dean gives her most shit-eating grin.

Sam stares. “I saw Cas.”

Dean stills.

“Yeah?” she asks after a few seconds. “How she looking?”

“She uh,” Sam rocks forward and rubs at her eyes, voice coming out hoarse. “I mean, she wasn’t real forthcoming but…she’s still kicking. And she asked about how we were doing. How you were doing.”

“Well, awesome,” Dean scoots her chair forward. “Sounds like a productive chit chat session.” She pulls her book toward her again and dips her head so her nose is nearly skimming the pages.

She expects Sam to say something else, but her sister seems more interested in staring at the same page for way too long, as if she’s turning some thought over in her mind.

They leave the special collections room half an hour later, at closing time. Sam only rolls her eyes when Dean makes AC/DC boy blush as they return their books.

“So you find anything?” Sam asks as they maneuver their way through a knot of students to reach the exit.

“Nothing overtly helpful, no,” Dean clacks the door open. She tries to bring up her mental notes. “There was one book. Mentioned a few things about getting monsters back from the dead.”

“Cas isn’t a monster.”

Dean finds herself wishing she could see Sam’s expression at that moment, because her voice has a definite edge to it.

“Not technically, but she is in monster heaven,” Dean amends.

“Right.” This time, Dean does look up, in time to find Sam biting the inside of her mouth. “Okay, what did it say?”

“Something about a specific combination of souls and abilities being needed? Strong intent? Super vague, you know how these guys could be.” Dean tugs her jacket closer, because she’d forgotten that Montana greets fall much earlier than the rest of the country.

“Combinations of souls?” Sam echoes.

“Yeah. Um, certain bonds, I think.” Dean peers up at her sister. “What?”

“Maybe that’s why Cas is coming into our dreams,” Sam says. “Because she knows us and everything. I dunno.” Sam leads them towards the parking garage. “It’s just a guess.”

“Does that mean someone out there is using us?” Dean asks. “Using our heads?”

“Can’t say,” Sam shrugs helplessly. “Cas never senses anyone else in our heads, but a powerful enough entity can hide itself.”

A sharp breeze darts through them, and Sam blinks into it, red-eyed and bleary.

“Hey, tell you what,” Dean nudges her sister’s side. “We haven’t had a job in forever. I’m sure someone around here needs their bones burnt. It’ll get our heads out of the libraries for a while.”

“I’ve kept an eye out,” Sam mumbles; she’s just ducked her mouth into her jacket to escape the breeze. “It’s been quiet.”

“Has it?” Dean means to sound casual. She reminds herself, with a firm mental jostle, that she hasn’t exactly been taking charge of finding new cases. The last time she’d searched “freaky shit,” she’d skimmed the first three stories before hopping over to porn.

So what if Sam’s fudging exactly how much attention she’s paying to supernatural activity? Dean’s fairly certain that as soon as she brings up a job, Sam will accompany her.

Whenever that happens.

“But there’s a library over in Oregon that has a good selection,” Sam says. “Maybe we’ll find something on the way there.”

“Yeah,” Dean’s voice echoes against the parking garage’s concrete. “Oregon. Sure there’s something.”

***

Sam used to tell Dean she was a neat freak, which always cracked Dean up because Sam was the one who would insist (non-ironically) that they dry clean and iron their fed suits. But Dean was starting to think Sam might have been on to something because nothing in Purgatory gave her quite the same pleasure as taking off an undead’s head in one clean swipe. It largely came of the fact that the alternative involved a lot of hacking, sawing, chasing, fending, and spattering.

But Dean was improving. Learning the weight of her weapon, the best angles of attack, how to apply the right pressure just so to slice through the spinal column and terminate the threat.

In their moments of relative peace, she and Benny would hash out who’d had the most badass kills. Dean forever insisted that the time she sliced through two vampires while dangling from a tree branch made her the victor. Then Benny would bring up the time he took out a wendigo using a kid-you-not flying kick and at that point, whoever argued the most heatedly won for the night.

Unless Cas got involved. Cas, with her grimy hospital clothes and nest of hair, scratching at the dirt with a stick a little ways away from Benny and Dean. Like she was scared of one and distasteful toward the other. (Dean never settled for herself which was which.)

“Do non-weapon deaths count?” she’d ask. “Or are symbolically phallic tools required?”

Cas could be so much like Sam sometimes, it _hurt_.

“Weapons only,” Dean might say, just as Benny allowed, “Any kind a kill.”

Then Cas would smile thinly and go ahead and say, “Because I once banished four angels and myself, carving the sigil into my vessel.”

“Banish doesn’t equal kill, smartass,” Dean said. “’Sides, it’s a vessel, you didn’t feel any pain if you didn’t have to.”

“I felt pain,” Castiel told her, and her smile grew sideways. “Not the physical cutting. But the sigil itself burnt into my Grace.”

Dean wondered what Castiel was getting at saying shit like that. Whether she thought she made herself sound like some martyr, or whether she liked jabbing at Dean just to see her flinch. Dean didn’t think she had to put up with it.

(Maybe Castiel would be better when they got topside. Maybe she’d stop avoiding Dean’s eyes.)

“We’re gonna stick to monster heaven,” Benny told them, reasonable and patient as you like. Dean shifted and stared at the leaf litter between her boots.

“Then I submit the time I burnt away three shape shifters,” Castiel shrugged, like she was above all of it anyway. Dean wanted to leap across the (too large) space separating them and strangle her.

Benny just grunted noncommittally, but by then there had too much tension to banter about killing monsters.

So Dean went for a walk. And as she walked she buried her blade into tree trunks and named the _thwacks_ one by one: Cas, God, dad, Dick Roman, Ruby, Sam, Cas and on and on and on. The trees had with sap like blood and, sometimes, human voices, but that never deterred Dean from burying steel as deep into them as she could manage.

Dean moves. She moves until she loses track of how long she’s been stalking through the forest. At some point, she pauses and looks around. Something tickles at the back of her mind, and she takes a few seconds to figure it out.

No monsters howl in the near distance. No trees creak in a heavy wind.

She can’t hear anything at all.

Well, that’s not true. She can hear her boots grinding into the leaf litter and her own breath. But even those are muffled, like she’s hearing them from speakers nearly, but not quite, turned on mute. Dean sticks a knuckle in one ear and looks around her again.

“Hey!” Dean yells.

The air swallows her voice in one gulp.

With an inhale, Dean whirls around to swing her blade into the nearest tree.

_Thump._

It’s something.

She does it again.

_Thwack_

“God.”

“Fucking.”

“Damnit.”

Dean opens her eyes. Her face is smushed against the Impala window. Dean can see thick tree trunks whizzing past her face, and wonders how they got a car into Purgatory. She then realizes these trees are probably the straightforward, Earth kind of trees that don’t whisper.

The car is slowing down. The trees become clearer and clearer until they sail past her window in gentle swells. Swells, because the car is rocking slightly. And there’s still:

“Shit.”

It hits Dean, and she straightens to turn towards Sam, a piece of her hair still splayed across her face.

“Don’t tell me we have a flat.”

Sam flinches, then side-eyes Dean beneath scrunched eyebrows.

“Maybe?”

“God—“ Dean leans forward, tugging the hair away from her eyes. “Pull over.”

Sam obeys, though it’s difficult with a road that has little to no shoulder between the yellow line and the trees. The engine falls silent, and Sam stares at the steering wheel like a puppy waiting for someone to scold her.

Dean leans over to bestow a light smack on the back of her sister’s head. “Stop that,” she orders, before clacking her door open and striding toward the back right wheel. Sam joins her a few seconds later, and they both contemplate the sagging rubber pooling on the gray pavement.

“I drove through a construction site a while back,” Sam offers, her voice still small. “Maybe there was a nail. Glass.”

Dean doesn’t answer because she’s trying to remember the last time she gave the Impala a real check-up. Yeah, she’d looked over it when she got back from Purgatory. But she’d been distracted, and it’s entirely possible that she noted a tire that would need replacing soon, but never followed up. Dean reaches out and places her hand on the Impala’s flank like an apology.

“I meant to get another spare back when we were in Illinois,” Dean says. “But then,” she waves her right hand, unbandaged now and all puckered, folded skin. The stitches need to be taken out soon. Sam hums in acknowledgment.

“Well,” Sam wipes a hand across her face. “We passed a driveway about ten minutes ago.”

Dean putters her lips and shrugs her jacket more securely over her shoulders.

“I’ll go,” she says. “You stay here in case someone drives by.”

Sam’s face drifts into something that looks worryingly like an argument. Dean waits for it, rocking back on her heels. A breeze picks up Sam’s hair in lazy waves.

“Keep an eye out for yourself,” Sam finally says.

“Always do, Sammy,” Dean throws her sister a wink.

After reassuring Sam that she has her cell phone and a packet of salt just in case, Dean takes off down the road with a jaunty whistle. Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” echoes across the trees and the pavement as Sam gets into the car again with a clatter.

After five minutes, Dean can twirl around, walk backwards several steps, and not see the Impala or Sam at all. She finishes “Enter Sandman” and drifts into the first few bars of “Play With Fire.”

The weather’s been tipping deeper and deeper into fall the last week, and it shows in the drifts of browning leaves. Dean tilts her head back to watch them flicker down to her. It’s not like Purgatory here at all. Purgatory trees never knew what season they were in, never changed from one day to the next.

Kicking a pebble into the leaf litter, Dean recalls a story that suicides become trees in Purgatory. She wonders why she never ran this theory by Benny and Cas, then decides she probably didn’t want an answer. Thinking of Benny makes Dean muse that she hasn’t called the guy in a while.

A squirrel makes Dean jerk her head up, and her whistling to stop abruptly. She doesn’t resume it, letting her bootsteps fill the crisp air. She can’t see anything resembling a driveway within viewing distance.

Fifteen minutes later, she’s about to call Sam and ask if she was _sure_ she saw a driveway when an errant breeze makes her stop short. Dean lifts her nose like a bloodhound and inhales quietly. No dice. The scent is gone. Dean looks behind her, at the ribbon of black road flanked by graying trees, then keeps walking.

“This is stupid,” she speaks aloud. “I feel like the chick at the beginning of a horror flick.”

Except you’re not a civilian, she reminds herself. Dad made sure of that one. As if thinking about him has invoked his spirit, Dean imagines what dad would be saying if he were walking with her.

“What are your surroundings?” he asks, the cadence of his voice and the smell of his leather jacket shockingly easy to conjure. “What weapons do you have on hand?”

Dean wants to laugh.

“I’m in the middle of a Montana forest and I have a steel switchblade, packet of salt, and busted hand, and a give ‘em hell attitude,” she says. After a moment she adds, “I have a cell phone which means Sam with a busted Impala which is something, maybe—“

She cuts herself off right before something cold slips across the back of her neck, like a strand of wet hair. Dean pulls her pocketknife into the open—thank god for spring-assisted blades—and lets her pace pick up speed. She has salt. She should use the salt, but when she experimentally flexes her right hand, she feels about half the muscles sluggishly respond.

She could run back to the Impala. There are guns back there. Sam’s back there, with her two functioning hands. She could call Sam, and have backup within a few minutes. She could keep going, switchblade held steadily at waist height.

And then Dean really wants to laugh, because it’s one ghost. She was handling these kinds of jobs by herself when she was fifteen and—

The man materializes silently a few paces ahead of her. Dean pauses, then keeps going, switchblade held out in warning. Her right hand is scrabbling for the salt in her pocket, and she manages a tenuous grip on the packet.

The ghost watches her without reaction, lined face slack beneath a tattered baseball hat. A torn button-up floats in a breeze moving in the wrong direction.

The salt emerges from her pocket and Dean considers that throwing it is going to be an issue unless she flags her switchblade.

“You’re not so murderous looking, are you?” Dean asks the ghost, keeping her pace steady. “You probably don’t wanna kill anyone, right? Just some poor sap who got killed here a few years ago and can’t move on, right?”

It helps to say it, anyway.

The ghost’s expression doesn’t change, but his head tilts ever so slightly and his eyes narrow. The pattern is so familiar, Dean feels her breath catch. And then he’s gone.

Dean stops, switchblade still up and packet of salt cupped in the palm of her right hand. The air smells like autumn and the only chill comes from the perfectly natural breeze sifting through her hair.

“Okay,” she says. She stabilizes her hold on the salt. “Okay.”

She starts walking again in long, loping strides that eat up the pavement. Sunlight winks at her from her steel blade.

The loping turns into a gentle jog when a battered blue mailbox appears in the distance. As Dean nears, she finds a winding driveway delving down a hill. Through a thinning canopy, she can make out the edges of a house and behind that a wide clearing.

“Halle—fucking—lujah,” Dean mutters, salt plopping back into her pocket.

The moment her boot hits the driveway, the smell of damp concrete and mold rolls over her like a blanket. In the split second between that and the omnipresent chill settling over her shoulders, Dean makes the executive decision to run like hell. Running never really helps though. Dean knows it. Which is why her switchblade is ready when a woman appears in front of her, face half eaten away and eyes blank. The steel blade sinks through the woman as if it can’t decide whether she exists or not, before the woman releases a half-hearted wail and disappears in a wisp of fog.

Two more pounding steps, and the man from the road is there. Steel blade. Dissolve. Go.

A girl with her hair in a neat bun, gone in a swipe. Dean needs the salt but she doesn’t trust her hand and then a young man who looks like he came from a century earlier is there, and Dean really wishes she had a salt gun on her as she banishes him with a thrust of her blade.

She’s halfway down the driveway when a hard shove at the small of her back sends Dean tripping into the pavement. Skin peels from her hands in angry streaks, but she still has the knife, the knife is the important part, and when Dean picks herself back up, the house is so damn close.

The first woman—the one missing half her face—appears in a whirlwind, and this time her expression is some approximation of anger, and her shriek is unearthly when Dean banishes her for a second time.

Five more steps. Four more. The little girl steps out from nowhere and is banished back into it. Dean clatters onto the porch and slams her scraped hands on the door, kicks too. Her voice comes out rough.

Thinking on it later, Dean will admit that this is not the ideal way to convince anyone to open their door. Even less so when the invader is wearing week-old clothes, wielding a switchblade, has one hand puckered and missing two fingers, face hard and skin grafted with blood and grit.

But the door does open, and the (blessedly living) woman peering out only has a few seconds to look confused before Dean shoves past her and slams the door shut. With fumbling hands, she kneels and shakes out one of the clumsiest salt lines she’s ever made in her life.

When she’s done, she drops the empty sack to the polished hardwood floor and pauses, switchblade still poised. The house remains quiet.

Dean stands to find the woman eyeing the salt line critically. She’s not old, but she’s far from young with those lines etched across her skin and the glasses perched haphazardly in a cloud of graying hair. She’s wearing dark jeans and a bright pink shirt with the Nike swoosh across its front that makes Dean think of soccer moms.

“I can explain later,” Dean lets the switchblade drop to her side. “But I need salt.”

The woman makes a sound deep in her throat.

“The smarter thing would be to put that weapon away,” the woman says. “They care more about that than salt.” She’s still watching the salt line like it’s a hairball her cat left lying around.

Dean blinks.

“What?”

The woman’s eyes finally flick to Dean.

“Here now,” her hands drop from her hips and she gestures at the switchblade. “Just put that away? I’m sure it’s what’s gotten them so riled up.”

“You a hunter?”

“I’m sorry?”

A John-sounding voice lists out all the reasons Dean should be muttering “Christo” or tossing salt on the woman or really doing anything except folding the blade of her switchblade up and stowing it in her pocket. But that’s what happens, through some internal chain of logic Dean doesn’t quite follow. And as soon as the blade disappears, it’s as if a ringing in her ears finally stops. She can hear birds squabbling outside, she realizes.

“There we go,” the woman smiles at Dean, if a little thinly. Dean’s lips twitch in response.

Her phone buzzes.

“I…” Dean lifts a hand, and the woman tilts her head as if to say _Well by all means. If you’re going to barge into my house and lay salt lines, why not answer your phone?_

It takes a moment for Dean to remember to use her left hand instead of her right.

“Dean!” Sam’s voice nearly bursts Dean’s eardrum. She holds the phone a few inches from her ear with a scowl.

“Yeah, what?” she asks, glancing behind her. The woman has crossed her arms.

“I just did an EMF reading,” Sam’s voice is higher than usual. “Tons of, I mean, Dean, there’s ghost activity all over this road.”

“Yeah I met a few of ‘em.”

“You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“I mean—where are you?”

“Um, the house with the driveway.” Dean tries to think of the best way to phrase ‘there’s a lady here who’s _off_ and I don’t know what she’s up to.’ “Even though getting here gave me the heeby jeebies.”

That would have to do. Sam would know to be on alert, at least.

“Okay,” Sam draws the word out after a long pause. “I’m coming, stay on the line.”

“Wait—“

“I’ll bring the gun and poker—“

“You just said the road is crawling, dumbass. You can’t fend—“

“Excuse me,” the woman interrupts, and Dean turns. She realizes, distantly, that she’s a good head taller than this lady. “You’re talking to…” the woman points at the phone.

“My…Sam.”

“Is he with the car?”

“What?”

“Well I’m not about to assume you walked out here.”

“Sam’s a girl.”

“Dean, what’s going on?” Sam asks. Dean can hear a door opening and closing.

“Hey,” she barks. “Stay in the damn car, I said.”

“She really should,” the woman says. “The iron should keep them at bay.”

“You hear that? Stay in the car.”

“I didn’t hear anything!” Sam retorts. “Who the hell’re you talking to?”

“The lady who owns the driveway. Sam, you’re not walking are you?”

“Until you tell me what’s going on, yeah.”

“Christ on a bike.” The woman takes a step forward and snatches the phone from Dean’s hand, earning herself a sharp “Hey!”

“Is this Sam?” the woman asks. Sam’s voice comes tinny and muffled. “My name is Tanya Van Allen,” the woman plows ahead, her brown eyes fixing on Dean. Dean finds herself stilling. “I have your friend in front of me and several ghosts haunting the premises. I really suggest you wait in the car and let us pick you up.” A pause, and Tanya’s back straightens. “Well I can’t _tell_ you what to do, but I’m trying to help. No, I’m sure I know better than to attack anyone with a knife.”

Tanya hands the phone back to Dean.

“I’m getting my keys,” she says. “Best keep her on the line, she might start having conniptions otherwise.”

Dean accepts the phone, but doesn’t lift it to her ear as Tanya leaves the front door and disappears into a room down the hall.

“Dean?” Sam’s voice calls from somewhere around her waist. Dean lifts the phone slowly. When she answers her sister, she hears herself from a distance.

“ _Whipsh_ ,” she says.

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

“You in the car?”

A loud sigh.

“Yes.”

“We’ll be there in a minute.”

“It’ll be more than a minute,” Sam grouches. “Everyone says in a minute, but they mean, like, five minutes.” Something thumps. “You’re a goddamn _idiot_. _I’m_ an idiot.”

“Hey, I made it fine,” Dean shifts on her feet and wonders if she should be peeking in the basement for corpses and floors slicked with viscera. Wouldn’t be the first time a nice lady’s turned out to eat babies or something.

“Nothing said you were going to,” Sam argues. “We’re an embarrassment. Car breaks down on a lonely rural road, god, wonder where that’s headed? Oh, one of them walks by herself to look for help. _That_ can’t go wrong.”

“So that makes me the butch one?” Dean asks. “’Cause the boyfriend always goes to check things out and then ends up—“

“Stop.” Something in Sam’s tone compels Dean to obey. She looks down at her piss-poor salt line.

“I made it fine,” she repeats. Sam remains silent on the other end.

“Garage is this way,” Tanya reappears in a light blue jacket, keys dangling from one hand.

“Yeah, okay. Sammy? We’re coming right now, okay? Hang tight.”

“I’m keeping the silver blade out,” Sam says, voice hard.

“Loud and clear, Xena.”

The garage lies past the kitchen, which is as semi-clean as most kitchens Dean’s seen in her days. The garage, likewise, isn’t overly cluttered but could probably do with a tidying one of these days. One car, a tan Lincoln, waits for them. Dean wonders abruptly whether there’s a Mr. Van Allen.

When Tanya backs them into the driveway, Dean can’t help but peer through her window, half expecting to find a ravaged face staring back. But the forest is calm and the sky still a brilliant blue, and the only hints that ghosts frequent the place are the congealing scrapes across Dean’s skin. She glances over to Tanya as subtly as she can manage, and tries to recall hearing anything about…what? Homes for wayward ghosts? Ghost wranglers? Retired hunters who keep the dead around? Dean wants to ask, but something forbids it. All she can tell herself is that nothing in that house feels dangerous. Only the things stalking it.

If Tanya feels Dean watching her, she gives no indication of such. Instead she settles her glasses on her nose and turns on her blinker when she leaves her driveway and tips her head back every so often as she drives. It takes Dean a moment to realize that she’s checking her speedometer. Which is all manner of old-lady-cute, even though this woman can’t be pushing 50.

“You still there?”

“Hold onto your panties,” Dean tells Sam.

“Y’know,” Tanya speaks up. “I don’t think I have your name.”

“Dean,” Dean replies after licking her lips. “Winchester.”

“Mm,” Tanya nods. No glance of surprise. No sound of recognition. Maybe she’s a hunter, but not part of the larger community.

The Impala comes into view a few minutes later. Dean can see Sam craning to watch them pull up beside her. Dean finally ends the call on her phone as she clambers from the car. Sam does the same, and ignores Dean as she makes a bee-line for Tanya, white-knuckling a silver knife in one hand and a flask in the other.

Dean leans back on her heels as Sam stops in front of Tanya, who’s halfway out of her car. Sam is massive compared to Tanya.

Something presses down on Dean’s eardrums suddenly, making them ring.

“Sorry,” Sam leans down. “But we have to check.”

Tanya watches, almost interestedly, as Sam dribbles holy water across her skin. Nothing sizzles. So Sam then lays the flat of the blade against Tanya’s hand, with its scattering of first liver spots. The trees shift around them for several long seconds, and Dean receives one good whiff of mold.

“What does that check?” Tanya asks when Sam pulls the blade away, her lips no longer a slash.

“Shape shifter, mainly,” Sam tells her, then shoots a look at Dean. Dean lifts her shoulders minutely before letting them fall. The pressure on her eardrums has lifted.

“Shape shifter, eh?” Tanya pulls herself the rest of the way from the car. “Learn something new, I suppose. What’s up with your car?”

Sam stashes the silver blade and flask into her jacket, suddenly looking sheepish.

“Flat tire,” Dean volunteers. “It’d be easy enough to change, but we don’t have a spare on us.”

“And you two don’t have AAA?” Tanya asks. Dean blanks, then glances at Sam for help.

“American Auto Association,” Sam prompts. Her eyes slide to Tanya before adding, “No, we don’t.”

“Tsch, typical,” Tanya proclaims as she makes her way towards the Impala. “You really ought to, the fees are worth the benefits. And that way you can call for someone to pick you up instead of traipsing along a haunted road.”

Dean has to roll in her lips and raise her eyebrows.

“Excuse me ma’am,” Sam steps towards Tanya, and Dean wants to laugh at how her sister’s become courteous all of a sudden. “If you have a spare tire you want to sell us, we can get out of your hair. Or you could drive us into town so we can buy it; we’d pay you for the gas.”

“No paying. You’re making it sound like I have a scam set up over here,” Tanya comments. She’s crouched next to the flat tire and Dean moves to get closer, curious despite herself. She and Sam watch silently as Tanya probes the grimy rubber, leaving her fingers streaked.

After a full minute, she stands and gazes at Sam and Dean solemnly through her glasses.

“No, you’re not paying,” she repeats. “ _I’ll_ be paying both of _you_ for your trouble.”

“What—“

“’m afraid it was my ghosts that got to your car,” Tanya continues. “Here, look.”

Sam and Dean both crouch beside Tanya to scrutinize the car. They find the weak spot-come-hole when Tanya points it out, and when Dean looks closer she almost can’t believe that it’s ringed with—

“Those teeth marks?” Sam asks. Dean settles back on her haunches, shaking her head and trying to remember reports of ghosts chewing apart tires.

“Sure are,” Tanya sighs and stands with a creak of ligaments. “Don’t ask me why or how, but I’ve seen this least five or six times.”

“Five or—how many people your ghosts trying to kill?” Dean asks. _Your ghosts_. It’s like they’ve stepped into the Twilight Zone.

“They haven’t ever killed anyone, far as I know,” Tanya snaps. “I’m making sure of that.”

“Yeah?” Dean straightens to a stand, Sam following suit. “They got pretty damn close just now.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t had a knife out, they’d have been less belligerent,” Tanya points out. She begins striding towards her Lincoln. “Get whatever valuables you need and get in. I have a few tires in the garage and I don’t feel like giving Herb any business. Last time I took my car in to him he tried to swindle me into paying $100 extra for a change of brakes.”

Sam tilts her head towards Dean.

“Should we bring a gun just in case?” her voice comes low.

“Her attack ghosts might get antsy.”

Sam bites her lip, looks to the ground.

They leave behind their big weapons, in the end. Sam sticks emergency cash and credit cards into her jacket pocket, grabs her laptop, and climbs into the back seat as Dean retakes the front. The car is silent as they return to Tanya’s house, and the sun that bathes Dean’s face is the orange-gold of deep afternoon.

Tanya brings them into the garage and turns off the ignition with a quiet sigh. Her shoulders are low.

The garage smells musty and like concrete when they emerge from the car, and Dean casts an eye for these spare tires Tanya has so conveniently lying around.

“Here,” Tanya answers her, edging past a lawnmower and a dusty plastic shelf to snag a tarp. With a sharp tug, she reveals a stack of three tires that, at a casual glance, don’t look in too shabby a shape.

“I’ll let you figure out which one you’ll want,” Tanya tells them. Dean and Sam don’t move, watching her shuffle to the garage door and unlocking it with a key capped in red plastic.

“Thanks for your help,” Sam offers, her voice echoing sloppily. Tanya opens the garage door with a creak.

“You shouldn’t be thanking,” she says, and disappears. Dean scuffs at the floor with her boot.

“What is she?” Sam asks. The sunset light casts her face in odd shadows.

“Psychic?” Dean tries. “Pagan goddess of the dead?”

“She’s not trying to kill us.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugs. “Maybe she’s too old to bother.”

Because they have no more practical option, Sam and Dean set on the tires, examining each one and agreeing that the middle looks the least worn.

“Just enough to get us into the next town,” Dean says as Sam carries the tire to lean it against the Lincoln. “We can—“

“Dean?”

“What?”

Sam points at a figure silhouetted against the deepening twilight. It’s the ghost Dean first met, cap and torn shirt and all. He’s watching them without expression, and Dean feels for her knife again. Sam is moving in front of Dean, arm out, and Dean almost doesn’t recognize it because she should be the one with a hand extended, not Sammy.

“Girls.” Tanya stands at the garage door threshold, the jacket off and glasses back in her hair. “Come on in.”

“There’s a—“

“I know, Sam, come on in.”

Sam looks at Dean and Dean gives one curt nod. The ghost still watching, they file into the house, blinking at the electric light. The windows look black now.

“Do you have the house protected?” Sam asks Tanya. The woman pulls her glasses from her hair and wipes them on her pink Nike shirt before perching them on her nose.

“No,” she says. “But you’re safe here.”

“How?” Dean steps forward. She holds out her palms, both of them, to show the scrapes. “This wasn’t an accident, lady. They were going to kill me. They’re _dangerous_.”

“Of course they’re dangerous,” Tanya flicks brown eyes across Dean’s hands before meeting her face. “You seem very learned about the supernatural, but I’m not stupid either. Absolutely they’re dangerous. Let me get some Neosporin.”

“I don’t need any friggin Neosporin,” Dean snaps. Sam’s hand brushes against her hip.

“Yes you do,” Tanya replies. “Sit down.” Dean remains standing just out of spite as Tanya disappears from the kitchen. Sam tucks her hands into her pockets.

“ _Wiptch_.”

“Shut your hole,” Dean orders. “You’re not telling me this is normal.”

“No,” Sam agrees. “But you’re the one who was telling _me_ to calm down earlier.” That’s true. It’s how they work. One of them allowed to freak out at a time.

And then Dean tries to recall why she’d climbed in this woman’s car in the first place. It doesn’t make a lick of sense from this vantage point. But here they are, whole and sound, and maybe it can stay like that.

Tanya returns with a generic first aid kit, and after a pointed look from her, Dean sits in a kitchen chair and allows Tanya to tend to the scrapes. They’re nothing really, but Tanya reminds Dean that even small cuts can become serious problems when infected, and sets on picking the gravel and dirt from them before smearing cloudy-clear ointment. Her fingers, all knobby knuckles and joints, move over Dean’s right hand without hesitation and without comment.

Sam perches on the kitchen table, her waist level with Dean’s face, and she watches the ministrations carefully. It puts Dean in mind of a few weeks ago, when Peter stitched her hand back together and Sam brooded.

When she’s finished Tanya puts aside her first aid and stands up. She gestures to Sam and Dean as she strides toward a sliding glass door and pulls aside the long blinds. Dean and Sam exchange a glance as they follow her to the canvass of black, spackled with the moths that haven’t yet gone into hibernation.

“I want you to see this,” Tanya gestures to the door. Dean’s sorely tempted to ask what the hell she’s supposed to be seeing, but Sam dutifully uses her hands as blinders and presses her face to the glass. Dean does the same after a quiet huff.

It takes a moment. And at first Dean thinks they’re fireflies, but they’re too white, too bright, too round.

“Are those ghost spheres?” Sam asks. She pulls her face away from the glass, but Dean keeps looking. The scene resembles an eldritch version of the Fourth of July, sickly lights popping in and out of existence. Sometimes, when they’re moving, they make bright streaks that make Dean think of fluorescent fungi. Of things that are pale and sunless and cold.

“I’ve never seen so many in one place,” Sam is saying, and Dean pulls away from the glass, the afterimages of the ghost spheres still floating in front of her.

“Me neither,” Tanya says, and the sigh she makes seems to fill the whole of her small chest before rattling out from between lips that still hold the gloss of chap stick. “They get antsy in response to negative emotions, but I’ve never seen them this busy.”

Dean and Sam exchange a look.

“You know about ghost spheres?” Tanya asks.

“Not quite ghosts,” Sam recites. “More like fragments of ectoplasmic energy. They’re usually harmless, but I’m not sure if the rules change when they’re all gathered like that.” Dean chances another glance out the door, in time to catch a thick smear of light applied not two yards from them.

“I doubt they can do much,” Tanya reaches between them to slide the blinds in place again. She places one hand on her hip and the other over her mouth, and neither Dean nor Sam interrupt the several seconds it takes her to frown at the still swinging blinds.

“You girls hungry?” She drops her hand suddenly. “I can warm something up easy.”

“We wouldn’t want to inconvenience you…” Sam tries.

“I told you, my ghosts are the reason you’re here. Now, I’m going to pull out one of my lasagnas and we can all explain ourselves over food. Food does wonders for moods.”

Which isn’t anything Dean can argue against, granted.

So she and Sam allow themselves to be stationed at the kitchen table, each with a glass of tap water, while Tanya extracts her promised lasagna from the freezer. Dean had been expecting a Stouffers prepackaged meal, and is pleasantly surprised to see an aluminum tray and heavy duty, oversized freezer bag instead. Her stomach makes a small gurgle of interest as Tanya pulls the frozen lasagna from its bag and pops it in the oven. That coaxes a smile from Sam when she glances over.

When Tanya starts pulling things out for a salad, Sam apparently can’t hold herself back and offers to help. Tanya allows her to wash lettuce in a big metal colander, and damn it if Sam doesn’t look like she’s having the time of her life scrubbing leaves.

Dean leans back in her chair and stifles a yawn as she examines the rest of the house from her vantage point. It’s not a new house, but not especially old either. She can see a living room to the right of the front door—her salt line has been cleared away—and the edge of a leather armchair. The main vestibule has a flowery chair and a table piled with the detritus of a household. The coat closet is half open, two pairs of shoes scattered in front of it. The dark, pitted hardwood floor has a black and red rug leading from the front door to the kitchen. It’s crooked, and one corner is flipped, as if someone tripped over it and never laid it smooth again.

No photos or kids’ drawings on the fridge. Just magnets from various museums and vacation destinations, and a white board with a few items listed out in blue dry erase marker.

Tanya asks Sam if she can prepare the tomatoes, and Dean shifts her attention to the off-white stove and the almost laughable scene of tall, stooped Sam next to Tanya with her bright pink shirt and narrow shoulder blades.

Somewhere the heater kicks on, and Dean slouches in her chair just a little bit more. She lets her blinks stretch out, lets her head come to rest on one hand.

The water splashing over Sam’s hands while she washes tomatoes is constant, rhythmic, and it reminds Dean of creeks.

They used to find creeks in Purgatory. They were odd things—everything was odd there—because sometimes they were the wrong color or the wrong consistency. More than once, Dean shoved her hand into the stream only to find something viscous and pale yellow or jelly-like and red or hot with _chunks_ floating in it. When the stuff in the creek resembled blood, Dean asked Benny if he wanted to give it a go, to which he’d always answer that, one, you never drank blood from anything except an artery and two, it’d be pretty stupid to be so close to freedom and then poison himself because he was a dumbass.

But when the creek ran clear and thin, when Dean could sniff the substance pooled in her palms and not detect anything resembling bodily fluids, she’d go ahead and drink it. She figured she’d had worse from countless bathroom taps.

“I don’t think that’s a fair comparison,” Castiel told her. “At least the liquid coming from your hotel taps was, beyond a doubt, water.”

“Wouldn’t be that optimistic,” Dean replied. She was rewarded with a tiny tilt of Castiel’s head that made the edges of Dean’s mouth twist up.

She and Cas were leaning against the base of a tree that began as a gumball, but then definitely became an ash at the top. Or so Castiel claimed; leaves were leaves as far as Dean knew. Benny had left them a few minutes ago, promising to be back soon. Dean wasn’t especially worried; Benny could take care of himself. But she had an ear open.

“So you can’t tell what the stuff in the creek is?” Dean asked, rolling her head in Castiel’s direction. “Or does that part of your angel mojo not work down here?”

“My _mojo_ works fine down here,” Castiel replied. She had returned her attention to the canopy hanging above them, through which a gray imitation of sunlight filtered. “The substance itself has no actual chemical makeup. It’s indescribable.”

“Indescribable,” Dean repeated.

“Everything here is indescribable. None of it even remotely follows the standard laws found in the rest of the universe.” She paused. “It’s actually very comparable to how the laws of physics break down near a point of infinite singularity. A black hole, if you will. Purgatory is the space circling a black hole.”

“Whoa now, you want to get into physics you need to get Sammy here,” Dean commented. “I’m sure you guys would have a ball.” The rip across her gut at Sammy’s name was unplanned, but not unexpected. Castiel glanced back at Dean, and her eyes were soft at the edges. Dean wondered if Cas missed Sam too. If she imagined all the research Sam was doing right now, trying to haul them both out. Dean hoped she was taking care of herself at least. Eating once in a while.

“What’re you gonna do first, when we get topside?” Dean asked. Castiel blinked.

“I have no plans.”

“Humor me.”

“Clean myself.”

“I wasn’t going to mention it but…” Dean laughed when Castiel gave her an affronted look, as if Dean had just suggested that she had a particularly gross STD.

“Hey man, I’m sure I don’t smell like a basket of roses either,” Dean nudged Castiel’s shoulder.

“You’ve never smelled like a basket of any flower.”

“Yeah?” Dean settled more fully against the tree trunk, and wondered, idly, if she should start looking for Benny soon.

“I don’t mean clean myself physically,” Castiel said, and her voice came so low Dean nearly didn’t hear her. Dean didn’t know how to approach answering that, and she ended up keeping her mouth shut and listening to the creek splatter past them.

Perhaps Castiel thought Dean hadn’t in fact heard her, because she didn’t say anything else for a long while.

“Hey, I’m going to go make sure Benny’s ok,” Dean said. Castiel nodded, her eyes fixed on her lap. Dean’s lips pressed together.

She rocked to a stand and headed in the direction she last saw Benny. She should have said something friendly before leaving Cas. To ensure no hard feelings.

But when Dean glanced behind, Castiel had disappeared from view.

So Dean keeps walking.

And walking.

And walking.

And…walking?

Dean stumbles to a halt. Then she slowly bends to rest her hands on her knees, her arms ramrod straight. She’s breathing heavily, and her calves and feet burn like she’s been trekking the forest for days. But that’s not right because she literally left Cas a minute ago.

Or a couple minutes ago?

Maybe it was an hour.

Could have been a few days. Even a year. Dean reviews her memory of walking and concludes that she can’t tell for the life of her.

Dean swallows, turns around, and jogs back the way she came.

For an hour.

A year.

A few centuries.

And then a few seconds.

The trees look exactly the same.

“Shit.” Dean’s courage fails her and she stops again. Her lungs are working like bellows. “Shit” she repeats. “Cas! Benny?”

It’s like she’s yelling in a soundproof room; her voice disappears into the air.

Dean’s joints are calcified and her bones are jellied, so she lets herself sink down. She digs her fingers into the soil. That steadies her enough to study her surroundings.

The colors are off, she decides. Not that Purgatory ever looked normal, but this is a different kind of weird. It’s like…it’s like Dean’s in an old, faded color photo.

Her fingers wriggle deeper into the ground; the loamy soil is cool and moist. Dean feels a sigh escape her. She closes her eyes and focuses on what her fingers are doing.

“Dean.”

It feels amazing. Like a cold beer on an August day. Her hands fully disappear into the ground.

“Hey, Dean.”

Maybe she can ease her whole body beneath the earth and stay there forever. No broken angels or homesickness there.

Something warm touches her temple. It’s like a brand compared to the cool soil.

“Hey.”

Dean peels her eyes open. Sam is crouched by her chair and has one thumb on Dean’s temple. Sam’s pulled her hair out of its ponytail for once, so chestnut waves spill over her shoulders and across her forehead and her eyes are bright and her cheeks red and Dean doesn’t voice this enough, but she has a beautiful sister.

The warm thumb on Dean’s temple lifts briefly before returning as a quiet shift of skin across skin. Sam learned how to do this from Dean, when Dean had to calm her down from nightmares or thunderstorms or the stomach flu. Dean can’t say where she learned it. From Mary, probably.

“How long was I out?” Dean asks. She’s bent awkwardly over the table, head cushioned on folded arms. She has no inclination to move.

“Maybe twenty minutes,” Sam assures her. “Food’s ready, if you want any.”

“Yeah.” Dean’s eyelids felt heavy. “I slept earlier today.”

“Mm.”

“How long was that?”

Sam hesitates. “Maybe five hours?”

Dean exhales.

“Why’m I so tired, Sammy?”

“You’ve been through a lot.”

Dean is still too sleep-fugged to properly argue.

Sam’s hand falls away from her face as a door shuts somewhere upstairs. By the time Tanya comes back into the kitchen, Sam is scavenging the cabinets for plates and utensils.

Tanya serves the lasagna in large, gooey squares that smell and taste like something Martha Stewart would whip together. Using her left hand to steer a fork is still awkward, but the lasagna makes it to her mouth, so Dean counts it as a win. She tries not to make too many noises while she eats, but Sam gives her pointed looks anyway.

Tanya eats slowly and distractedly, her gaze shifting to the walls and windows too many times.

When everyone has sated their initial hunger, Tanya offers seconds—Dean accepts with enthusiasm—before asking, “Are you girls related?”

“Sisters,” Sam supplies, a cucumber halfway to her mouth. Tanya’s smile reaches her eyes.

“You don’t look too much alike,” she says. “But your mannerisms,” she shrugs and scrapes her fork across her plate. “I used to have a pair of sons that remind me of you two.”

Sam scoots her chair forward and inch and asks, “Used to?”

“Mm,” Tanya nods, then touches her glasses, her hand partially covering her face. “They died a few years back.” A pause. “I’m sorry, that’s deeply macabre of me.”

“We deal with ten kinds of macabre every week,” Dean says—they used to, in any case.

“Obviously,” Tanya straightens. “You’ll have to satiate my curiosity. Do you girls deal with ghosts a lot?”

“We’re hunters,” Sam says. Tanya’s expression remains politely puzzled, and Dean’s foot starts a staccato against the floor.

“Hunters,” Tanya repeats. “Hunting ghosts?”

“Hunting anything supernatural,” Sam puts her fork down completely. “Vampires. Wendigos. Demons.”

“Demons!” Tanya’s face twists. “Don’t tell me demons exist.”

“I um,” Sam glances at Dean for help. “Yes?”

Tanya stares at Sam, then turns to Dean, who focuses on the pattern of colorful squares framing Tanya’s glasses.

“Demons,” she repeats. “So the Bible…does God exist? Angels?” The arch appears above Sam’s brows.

“It’s pretty much all real, yeah,” she says. Tanya’s lips thin out to a pink line.

For someone who lives on a haunted ass road, Dean thinks, Tanya looks a little too floored. But then Dean remembers a pine coffin and a raw handprint from four years ago and she swirls her fork through the remnants of her cheese almost thoughtfully.

Tanya places her elbows on the table and folds her hands.

“Well,” she says. “Anything else I should know? I ought to leave a bowl of milk out for the little folk? Keep an eye out during the full moon?”

“Don’t bother with the milk, the fey are assholes,” Dean says.

“I was joking,” Tanya looks askance at Dean before adjusting her glasses again. “Fine. So. You two… _hunt_ things?” she wags a finger between Sam and Dean.

“Things that hurt people, yeah,” Sam nods.

“Ghosts included?”

“Ghosts included.”

“And being honest,” Dean says around a bite of lasagna, “every instinct is screaming at me to book it to the nearest library and figure out what’s wrong with your road, ‘cause I don’t think we’ve ever seen ghosts this thick outside of a graveyard.”

“Yes, I can believe that,” Tanya tilts her head, her eyes briefly obscured behind glass lenses catching the light.

“You want to…tell us what you know?” Dean notices Sam’s fingers twitch for a pencil and notepad that aren’t there, and stifles the urge to grin.

“I’m not sure how much I actually know.” Tanya pushes her half-empty plate away and folds her hands again. She looks too exposed suddenly, with her arms that are thin and weathered and brown. “Um,” she dips her head to the right and rubs a forehead creased in horizontal lines. “Okay. I’ve been living here for…gosh, almost 12 years now? And the ghosts started about eight years ago. I, um, I started to see them through the window, on the side of the road on the way to town. Sometimes in the driveway.” She turns to Dean. “Did you catch sight of the lady with her face missing?”

“Sure,” Dean chirps. “She seemed like a real charmer.”

“I’m pretty sure her name is Katherine Longfellow,” Tanya nods. “If I did my research right. Died in a house fire back in town in the 1910s. Quite young. Quite tragic. And then there’s Fred Richardson in the cap, he died in a car accident on this road in the 2000s. I remember it happening, actually. The crash on a Wednesday and his ghost wandering around the yard by Thursday.” She settles more fully into her chair. “The girl and the other young man I never found names for, but they’ve been here since the beginning. Not as bold as Katherine and Fred, but they’ll make an appearance. Those are the main four who appear as whole people. Sometimes I see others, but they never stay long enough for me to see them properly.”

“And that’s it?” Sam asks.

“Well that and the ghost spheres,” Tanya shrugs. “They come and go, depending.” She shoots a look at the sliding glass door again. “Depending on who’s here. What’s going on.”

“Okay,” Dean scoots forward, hands out to frame the idea she’s trying to form. “So you have a family of ghosts hanging around. But what do they do? ‘Cause they’re not haunting you in the normal sense, like, at all.”

“What’s the normal sense?” Tanys asks, her chair creaking.

“Trying to kill you. Messing things up in the house,” Sam suggests.

“No, they never touch the house,” Tanya shakes her head, causing her graying hair to swing. “That’s why I told you it was safe. Even when they’re at their angriest, they never come into the house. They never bother me, either. They—“ here Tanya hesitates, and her fingertips interlace. “They protect me.”

A beat of silence.

“Protect you.” Dean would be smiling, but the scrapes across her hand still smart beneath the Neosporin and band-aids.

“That’s not normal?” Tanya asks.

“Not especially,” Sam murmurs. “Why do you think they protect you?”

“Because they do. You ought to know,” Tanya gestures at Dean. “You came in here with a knife and they only settled down once you put it away. Tell you what, I once had a young man try to break in here. Tried, because he was…attacked while picking the lock. I found him on the porch when I came back from work and…” she inhales and smiles thinly. “He was still alive. But just barely. He described my ghosts perfectly afterwards. So.”

Dean glances at her sister, then breathes out through pursed lips as she leans back and placed her hands atop her head. If she had all her fingers, they’d be interlaced.

“This is fucked up,” she announces.

Sam’s boot connects with her shin while Tanya’s back straightens incrementally.

“You didn’t know any of these people when they were alive,” Sam says, ignoring Dean’s hiss through gritted teeth.

“Not at all.”

“But they all died near here.”

“I assume so, yes.”

“Where’re you going with this?” Dean asks.

“What about your sons?” Sam places her hands flat on the table and leans forward. Tanya almost simultaneously leans back, and her eyes turn hooded.

“If they became ghosts I’ve never seen them.”

“Let me guess. They died almost eight years ago. Right before the ghosts started appearing.”

Tanya is silent for several long seconds before she nods.

“How did they die?”

Dean wants to warn Sam, because the back of Tanya’s hand is cording.

“My ex-boyfriend was released from prison,” she says in clipped words. “He got his hands on a gun and came here after the kids had come home from school. While I was still at work. I um…I was working an extra shift. Otherwise I’d have been at home too, but he didn’t know that.”

Sam slumps back in her chair. And even though Dean’s heard enough fucked up stories like this, her heart still drops into her stomach. _People_.

“Were they buried?” Sam asks.

“Cremated.”

Dean bites the inside of her mouth and meets Sam’s eyes. The clock hanging above the stove swells into cavernous tics, as silence wraps around them and the remains of their dinner.

“We’re just asking,” Dean takes over, pitching her voice soft, “because usually ghosts focus on a person when they have unfinished business with them. If it were your kids, we’d know what we were doing.”

“But this is…way, way off the reservation,” Sam adds. Tanya’s smile is humorless.

“Lucky me.”

***

Dean is back at the sliding glass door while Sam and Tanya finish the washing up—only so many people can help before it becomes an annoyance, Tanya had explained. Not as politely as she’d been speaking before. But Dean can’t find any room to blame her. They’re probably lucky that Tanya hasn’t booted them out and let the ghosts have at them.

Instead she had stood beside her sink with one hand gripping the edge of the counter and explained, “I have a sleeper sofa. Won’t take more than a few minutes to set up. We can get to your car in the morning.” Dean and Sam had nodded, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.

Dean’s breath fogs the chilled glass, and she wipes it away with the sleeve of her jacket. An orb of sickly light bobs past her. Dean tracks its progress along the dim outline of a flowerbed before it dodges a full-length skirt. Dean’s eyes travel up the skirt to find a half-burnt face staring at her like something out of a B rated horror movie. Dean gives her the finger. The ghost—Katherine—looks unimpressed.

“Dean.”

Dean maintains eye contact with the ghost for another several seconds before turning away from the window to find Sam watching her, hands jammed in her jeans pockets and lips bunched to one side.

“Help me get the sleeper sofa set up.”

Said sleeper sofa feels like it hasn’t been pulled out for a few years. The metal creaks and whines like a living thing as Sam and Dean haul it into place. Tanya is somewhere upstairs, scouting out pillows and blankets despite Dean’s promise that a mattress is pretty much all they need.

“A mattress is all _you_ need,” Sam points out after Tanya gives them an indulgently puzzled look and goes upstairs anyway. “I like pillows and blankets.”

“Try sleeping on grass and leaves for a year and let me know how a mattress sounds.” Dean slaps Sam’s arm distractedly, and only glances up when Sam doesn’t have anything to say. She finds thin lips and a tight jaw.

“So thoughts?” Dean plops on the sleeper sofa and her voice is nearly drowned out by the squeal of springs.

“I really don’t think she’s any kind of goddess or…creature,” Sam lowers her voice and looks behind her towards empty stairs. She joins Dean on the mattress so she can speak in a bare whisper. “She could be a kind of psychic. Has the right emotional or mental wavelength to influence ectoplasmic energy.”

“Come again?”

“Can control ghosts. Like, there was this guy in Chicago during Prohibition who used ghosts to dominate the alcohol trade by chasing his competitors out.”

“Dude, really?” Dean feels her face nearly split with a sudden grin. “That’s awesome.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s eyes linger on Dean before they drop to her knees. “I don’t think that Tanya’s controlling anything explicitly, but I think they understand her wants, her fear and guilt. And they’re responding. Maybe.”

Dean nods slowly.

“Ex-boyfriend invades her home and kills her kids. Next thing you know, ghosts are giving her an ace security system. Makes sense.”

“And if you keep going with that logic,” Sam continues, “It’d also make sense that they attack the people with the guns and knives in their trunk.”

“They’d have been better off letting us go,” Dean scowls abruptly. “Wouldn’t have bothered with Tanya if they hadn’t chewed through Baby’s tire.”

“Well they’re ghosts, aren’t they?” Sam shrugs. “Their logic is always a little skewed.”

“Hear you there,” Dean murmurs as a thump heralds Tanya’s arrival with an armful of sheets.

“They’re a little worn, but they’re clean,” Tanya promises as she tugs the sheets onto the mattress with sharp, neat movements. “I’m afraid what would be my guest bedroom is my office. Just converted it last month.”

“These are great, I promise,” Sam tucks the sheet around the mattress with admittedly sloppier results, which Tanya casually fixes.

“I don’t have to be at the hospital until 3 p.m. tomorrow,” Tanya tells them as she does this. “So you girls sleep in.”

Given her pattern the last week, Dean’s sure she will.

Tanya leaves them with a final promise that the house is secure then ascends the stairs in quiet footfalls.

“I wish we would have grabbed our duffels. I hate sleeping in day clothes,” Sam says, wrestling a boot off and letting it drop from her hands with a clatter.

“Want some cheese with that whine?” Dean asks.

“Shut up,” Sam yanks her second boot off and aims it at Dean’s calf. She misses. “Let me look at your hand.”

The three fingers twitch.

“Why?”

“I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t go south.” Sam shucks her jeans and, after folding them into a neat square, scoots fully onto the mattress. The jacket was thrown onto the armchair at some point, so all Sam has left is a faded gray shirt, plain white briefs, and a pair of red socks at the end of corded, unshaven legs.

“Do you even own a razor, Sasquatch?” Dean asks.

Sam rolls her eyes and crosses her legs. Dean shrugs off her jacket and toes off her boots, but keeps her jeans on.

“Those are filthy,” Sam looks at them as Dean knee-walks towards her.

“She’ll be washing these sheets tomorrow,” Dean points out, and sits with her legs tucked beneath her. She thrusts the hand towards Sam. Sam takes it in browned hands and skims her fingers over the puckered scars.

“The witches really did not help this,” she murmurs. Dean keeps her eyes on her hand, examining the warped skin and withered muscle. “You been doing any of the physical therapy?” Sam asks.

“My hand hurts afterwards,” Dean says.

 “Well yeah. It’s like a workout.”

“Doesn’t feel like a workout. And last I checked you studied law, not therapy.”

“I’m the best you’ve got,” Sam’s hands feel at the muscle, and it’s like when Dean’s foot falls asleep, and she can punch it without getting more than a distant sense that this lump of flesh is actually connected to her. Sam said the doctors reported massive nerve damage. Sam said Dean couldn’t drive or shoot a gun. Dean had essentially told Sam to fuck off when she heard that.

“We could try and find a physical therapist in the area,” Sam stops feeling at the hand, but she doesn’t let go of it. “At least to give it a look. Suggest some real exercises.”

Dean replies with a mutinous expression, and Sam’s eyes narrow.

“You’re a stubborn ass,” she says. A moment of silence. “Once we get Cas back, she’ll probably be able to give you a whole new hand anyway.”

And there’s just so much shit packed into that sentence, Dean has no better response than to yank her hand away and shuffle to the far side of the mattress. She plops down lengthwise, folds her arms, and hopes her jeans shed enough gritty dirt to collect along Sam’s bare legs and make them itch.

She hears Sam make some motion—maybe flicking her off—before the mattress wails and socks pad against wood. Dean watches through slitted eyes as Sam walks from the living room and disappears towards the kitchen.

Cabinet doors swing open, containers shuffle. When Sam comes back, she has a black cylindrical container with a splash of white illustration visible. She begins pouring a thick salt line around the sleeper sofa. Dean watches her, wondering why she hadn’t thought of it sooner, as Sam’s hair spills past her shoulder and hangs in front of her face.

“Tanya might not like that,” she says. Sam huffs in laughter.

“That’s what she gets for letting a pair of hunters sleep under her haunted roof,” she says. She finishes the ring with a little shake of the container, then pops the metal piece back in and carries it to the mattress. She sticks the container on the coffee table, within arm’s reach. She climbs under the covers and tugs at them.

“Why don’t you ever sleep under the covers?” she complains. “Give me more.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” Dean says, and lifts her torso so Sam can pull more mothball-smelling sheets towards her. She slept under covers a few nights ago. That had been nice. Maybe she can take off her jeans at least.

Sam shuffles around a few times before she stills. Dean is left with the gentle darkness and the tick of the clock and the sense that she’s been here many times before. In a strange house, atop a strange mattress, but with rock-solid knowledge that Sammy is at her back and that monsters exist and will kill her if they can.

***

“Sister,” Benny spoke in a low voice. He nodded in a direction and Dean glanced over to find vague shadows. Not too close. But close enough. She hefted her blade and let herself settle into a point of calm.

“What are they?” she asked. She could make out humanoid shapes.

“Smells like sirens,” Benny murmured. “Stink like sex.”

Dean wouldn’t have minded stinking like sex, but she’d admit that sirens were bad news. She gestured to Benny, pointing to a copse of pines in one direction, then a line of boulders in another. They’d split up and use the trees and boulders for cover as they circled around behind the sirens. Take them out clean and neat.

Benny nodded and adjusted his cap. He reached out to clap Dean’s upper arm.

“Luck, sister,” he said.

Movement across a pine needle bed was careful work, but not dangerous. John had taught her and Sam how to do it. How to account for ears that heard every shuffle, how to pattern their movements into something that sounded like wind or a few small mammals scuffling through underbrush. Harmless. Thoughtless.

 _I’m a vole_ , Dean found herself mentally chanting. _I’m a little vole that is no threat to you._ She wanted to laugh, because not once had she seen anything in Purgatory as familiar and benign as a vole. Unless they had werevoles here, which would just have been a whole new level of hilarious.

The sirens appeared suddenly, more solid than before and without the glamour of their human faces. Pale skin and empty eyes: pure nightmare material. Dean paused, then stole a few more paces forward. She counted three. Not terrible. She and Benny could handle it.

Benny appeared several yards away as a dim shape, a darker smudge of grey beneath the shadow of trees that wept when the wind curled through their branches. It said something that Dean recognized Benny at all. That she could all but sense the signal he gave before they scooted forward like wolves.

Dean focused on the two nearest her, blade up and poised. One of them stood taller than she’d expected, with longer hair, which didn’t make a lick of sense because a second ago the sirens had been bald and nasty and now they looked so sickeningly familiar that Dean flagged.

“Dean?” Sam asked, and her hair floated around her face in sweeping waves that Dean once decided had come from Mary. Dean loved Sam’s hair, even though she’d never have admitted it. Secretly adored when Sam had been younger and let it grow all the way down her back, pinned it up in elaborate braids and twists, held by small, clever bobby pins and elastic bands. Sometimes Dean pretended to bully Sam into letting her brush out the knots, and Sam pretended to only tolerate it.

Dean stared at that hair and felt something hot close up the back of her throat.

“Hello Dean,” a lower voice said. The second person turned around and Dean found dark hair above stupidly blue eyes above slight bags that Jenny Novak must have garnered from too many late nights at the office. Castiel still looked like a holy tax accountant. Still had the nice business clothes she’d inherited from Jenny, not the grimy hospital uniform. Her Grace still spun from her skin. She looked like no one named Dean Winchester had touched her yet.

Their heads detached in a spray of aortal blood. Dean met Benny’s eyes over neck stumps before the bodies collapsed. Her blade hung by her side, its tip dragging through leaf litter.

“I…” Dean could feel the hot, close sensation in her throat growing and creeping forward. “I.” She took a step back right as Benny strode over the white, naked remains of the sirens.

“Calm down,” he ordered. His big hands took Dean’s shoulder before she could spring away, and he peered at her from beneath the brim of his cap. “Take a few breaths Dean.”

“How could I…” Dean swallowed, “I’m a fucking idiot.”

“They’re tricky,” Benny promised. “Once, I almost got myself killed—again—because one of these looked like someone I cared about. Hey.” He jostled Dean’s shoulders. “It’s fine.”

Dean felt her nostrils flare as she inhaled.

“I thought they couldn’t do that here,” she admitted.

“Best not to assume things like that, Sister.”

“Wait,” Dean lifted her head. “Where’s Cas then?”

“What?”

“Cas. The real Cas. Where is she then?”

“We haven’t found her yet.”

“Really I…” Dean turned slightly, but she must have turned more than she’d thought, because Benny disappeared. The forest hazed and blurred together to form a dirty overcoat and nest of hair.

“I see them,” Castiel said.

Dean lowered her center of gravity.

“Can you tell how many yet?” she asked. Castiel didn’t reply, only clenched and unclenched one fist.

“Cas.”

“Mm.”

“How many Leviathan?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel looks over at her in a flash of real blue—the only blue Dean sees here. “Do you remember this, Dean?”

Dean isn’t listening. She stares at Castiel’s feet. A garden’s worth of flowers churn around them; their faces all tilt toward Castiel like an adoring crowd.

“Dean.”

“ _What_?”

“This was my fault, do you remember that?”

“It’s not your _fault_.” Dean shifts her attention back up to Castiel’s face. The flowers riot in the corner of her eye.

“I underestimated their numbers.” Castiel points to the forest behind them. “In three minutes, as we’re in the midst of fending off a pack of six, another group will come from behind.” Dean is slowly straightening. “You’ll nearly die,” Castiel says. “And I’ll wonder for a long time what happens when a human dies in Purgatory.”

Dean exhales through pursed lips and lets the tip of her blade sink into loamy soil. A steep wind sifts across the clearing and back into forest. Castiel looks back at her again, and there’s an extra cut across her cheek that Dean doesn’t remember, and deeper bags under her eyes and an expression that Dean has a hard time interpreting. “I mean,” Dean says after a few moments of silence. “No one died. If that helps you.”

“We came very close,” Castiel reminds her.

The trees wail around them.

“If I wasted my time mooning over every time I almost died,” Dean shrugs and tries to laugh but the sound comes out all wrong. Castiel shifts, and for a wild moment Dean thinks she’s about to run or fly away and has half a mind to grab at Castiel’s grimy coat.

“I mean to be fair,” Dean forces out, “In a few days me and Benny are going to leave you behind.”

Castiel smiles brilliantly.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she says. She pauses and looks around. “No one here except you and me,” she says. She frowns. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone is orchestrating this. It’s too random and sloppy.”

“What?” Dean’s having a hard time processing words.

“Maybe you and Sam are doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Pulling—“ Cas’ voice cuts off like someone’s pulled the cord from the sound jack. As Dean stares, Castiel seems to zoom out of focus, blurring into the forest.

“Hey!” Dean runs after her.

Trees speed past her, their sobs rising and falling. Castiel moves in unknowable strides; Dean can’t keep up with her.

“Sorry, damn it!” she shouts. “I’m sorry I—Cas! Stop, just let me…”

“Dean!” Sam grabs her arm. “What do you think…” she trails off and the trees blur so hard it gave Dean a headache. She’s moving too quickly, and she’s leaving her stomach behind in every step, but Cas is still up there so Dean grabs Sam’s hand and tugs her after her.

“We hafta catch up,” Dean explains, her voice disappearing into wind. “We hafta explain why I’m not praying to her. She might think…might think I don’t, didn’t want to save her. I didn’t save her, Sammy.”

“I didn’t save you,” Sam points out, her hand tightening around Dean’s.

“I made it out though, didn’t I?” Dean laughs. She glances back to find Sam squinting at her. “We need to find Cas. Need to find Cas.” She looks forward again, but the trees have dimmed into near blackness. “Need to find her. Need to say sorry. I don’t pray to her anymore.”

It’s odd. Because Dean can… _sense_ time trying to warp itself around her again. Moments pass languorously but never turn into centuries. Dean’s footsteps dim but never quite drop away. And Sam’s presence wavers, but never disappears. Dean gets a glimpse of color at her feet, glances down, and realizes that Sam is wading through flowers.

And then: lights.

Pale, bobbing lights.

Cas is a smudge in the distance.

Streaks of sickly glow like fungi.

Dean stops so suddenly she gets whiplash. She bends over and tries to hurl, but she’s not actually nauseous, so she straightens again to find herself standing in the middle of a cloud of bobbing, glowing spheres.

The breeze sifts right through her shirt, and she shudders hard enough to make her organs twist. A hand touches her face, pushes hair behind her ear. Sam’s hand is still ensconced in Dean’s, and it’s hovering between cold and warm.

“I pray to her.”

Dean can feel dewy grass between her toes, and arms raised with goosebumps. Her body awash in pale light. The presence a little behind and to her left is tall, warm, smells like too many things to categorize.

“You pray?” Dean asks.

“Every night,” Sam says. “So she knows we’re still trying.”

“She thinks I abandoned her.” Dean’s mouth turns down at the edges, and her chin bunches up. “I’ve abandoned her.”

Sam steps a little closer.

They watch the ghost spheres drift through Tanya’s yard like so many dust particles. No human shapes. Just the lights and the swaying, and Dean’s still half sure that Castiel is waiting beyond them.

Sam is patient—Sam stays so patient so much of the time—and it’s only when Dean remembers that Sam took off her jeans that she turns around.

“Sorry,” she says. “You must be freezing. Get back inside.”

“You coming with?” Sam asks.

Her hair is down, like the siren, but it’s mercifully bedraggled and unflattering.

“Sure.”

They’re still holding hands when they open the sliding glass door and step into the kitchen, like they’re little girls seeking an anchor in the muddle of things.

***

Tanya finds them dressed and trying to put away the sleeper sofa the next morning. Dean has just told Sam off for letting her finger get caught the metal hinge when they hear a shuffle of slippers against wood.

“Don’t need to lose any more of these things—oh,” Dean straightens and lets her throbbing hand drop. “Hi.”

“You girls managing?” Tanya asks. Her glasses are nowhere to be seen, and she squints at them through a sunbeam of dusty light. Her shirt today is a worn, red thing displaying a white teddy bear holding balloons. “March Against Childhood Leukemia,” hovers above the bear’s head. Her jeans are faded and a little too big.

“We got it,” Sam promises. Tanya nods once, slowly.

“I’m putting on some coffee,” she says. “We’ll leave soon as you like.”

Sam waits until Tanya disappears before shooting Dean a dirty look. Dean mouths an exaggerated “ _what_?” in reply.

They tackle the mattress a second time to find that it slips into the sofa easy as butter.

Tanya is standing by the sliding glass door when Dean enters the kitchen, Sam disappearing into the bathroom behind her. Over Tanya’s shoulder, Dean finds a wide, sloping yard that ends in forest several hundred paces away. Trees dot the slightly overgrown expanse of grass: tall, strong trees that stay the same species all the way from their roots to the tips of their sun-dappled leaves.

“I don’t see anything,” Tanya speaks. She turns her head slightly. “Do you?”

Dean takes it as an invitation to step closer to the glass. From this vantage point, she finds a stone-lined flowerbed, full of sun-bleached mulch and still holding onto its marigolds. A ceramic cat lounges among the dormant remains of what looks like rose bushes.

“Looks clear to me,” Dean nods. “Though if I had my EMF reader I could say for sure.” Tanya’s eyes are still glued to the yard. The rising sunlight gets caught up in the cloud of hair spiraling from her face, illuminates her high cheekbones and slightly mottled skin. Dean wonders if Tanya’s ex-boyfriend had noticed these details, back when they’d thought themselves worth dating.

“Moods always get better in the morning,” Tanya says. “That’s probably why ghosts usually show up in the evenings and nights. Mornings are generally too cheerful for them.”

Dean’s fought her share of ghosts in the morning light, but she keeps her mouth shut.

When Sam emerges from the bathroom, Tanya grills both of them on what they want for breakfast, and it becomes a struggle to assure her that a granola bar works.

The sunlight has turned a frothy yellow when they pull out of the driveway, sifting through the canopy to spackle across the Lincoln’s dashboard. Sam takes the front seat this time, answering questions like “Now can demons really possess people?” and “Do vampires come out in the sun or not?” Dean claims the back, stares at blurring trees, and wonders yet again how Benny’s getting along. She should drop him a call.

The Impala looks whole and unmolested by any further ghost teeth, and it’s short work to replace the chewed tire with the one from Tanya’s garage. As Dean gives the final touch ups, she can hear Sam speaking above her head.

“So I feel kind of contractually obliged to ask,” she says, “but do you want us to give you a hand with these ghosts? Because we could do some research. Figure out how to deal with them.” Dean wipes a smudge of grease on her jeans before glancing up to find that Tanya has crossed her arms, head cocked and eyebrows low.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she says carefully. The sigh that rattles her looks almost too big for her chest. “I don’t know. They might kill someone eventually. Or hurt them badly enough.”

“Ghosts are all about vengeance,” Sam offers, voice low. “They’re not _nice_.”

“Oh no,” Tanya shakes her head, and her smile is a wry one. “No, they’re not nice at all.”

Dean exhales and shoves her hair away from her face as she surveys the forest. Nothing to see save downright postcard worthy autumn scenery.

“I mean to be fair,” she offers, standing, “they’re damn good guard dogs.”

Tanya nods, lips still thin.

“Here.” Sam digs into her pockets and extracts a pen and old receipt. “Give us a call whenever. We’ll get to you, or send someone who can help.” She scribbles out a number and offers it to Tanya. Tanya regards the receipt with guarded suspicion. Dean swears she catches a whiff of mold, but it’s gone the next second, burnt away by the morning sun. Tanya takes the receipt.

“I’ll have to let this one sit,” she admits, folding it neatly in half and hiding it in her hand. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten quite used to my ghosts.”

Sam and Dean exchange a glance, and Sam lifts one shoulder incrementally.

A few minutes later, Tanya watches with folded arms as Dean and Sam climb into the Impala, her shirt echoing the red of the leaves hanging over her head. Dean keeps an eye on her through the rearview mirror while Sam starts the ignition. The purr of the motor settles something in her, and she drops her eyes from Tanya to glance over at Sam.

“I kind of want to rub salt into the tires,” she admits.

“We’ll drive fast ‘till we’re out of their range,” Sam promises, then sticks a hand out the window to wave goodbye to Tanya. Dean does the same after a moment’s hesitation. She sees a thin brown arm wave in reply.

“That was weird,” Dean says as they pull forward, and Tanya and her Lincoln become smaller and smaller. “Really weird.” She hesitates. “Should we have pushed harder to get rid of the ghosts?”

“How come?” Sam asks, inching the Impala towards 40 mph.

“Someone’s gonna get killed eventually,” Dean leans forward. “And then that’ll be on us.”

“No,” Sam’s eyes are a blur of hazel. “No, they belong to Tanya. It’ll be her fault. She knows that.”

Dean presses her lips together then slowly leans back in her seat. After a minute she slides her feet from her boots to prop them onto the dashboard. She grins when Sam complains about the smell.

***

Sam keeps a good pace, and they’re out of Montana by the end of the day. The strip of Idaho takes them a little over an hour, and then it’s into the damp, rainy mess known as Washington. It makes Dean remember why she avoids the Pacific Northwest in the fall.

“Why can’t we go to California?” she asks, tracking the wipers as they shudder across the windshield. “Don’t _they_ have any old books to sift through?” A leaf flies into the glass and sticks, its edges trembling.  Dean admires the weak sunlight filtering through its orange hue before looking over.

Sam’s grip is loose on the steering wheel, her lips rolled in.

“Hey,” Dean says. Sam hitches forward and her hands slide up the wheel.

“What?”

“Does California not have as good libraries or what?” Dean stretches her arms above her head, lets her back and shoulders pop.

“We’ll go there next,” Sam promises. She flips the turn signal even though they’re in the left hand turn lane at an empty intersection. Dean opens her mouth to say something, but Sam beats her to the punch.

“Do you dream about Cas much?”

“My type isn’t really holy tax accountant, y’know?” Sam gives her a _look_. Dean deflates a little. “Sometimes. But I’m pretty sure she’s just, y’know, part of my own psyche.”

“Right. I um,” Sam’s hand comes up to wipe across her open mouth, her pointer and thumb lingering on her lower lip. “I’ve been thinking about last night…” she pauses, then backtracks. “You sounded like you saw her.”

“Oh,” Dean tucks her hands under her thighs and listens to passing cars tread wet pavement. “Yeah. I guess I did. Kinda fuzzy.”

“What were you dreaming about, exactly?”

Dean considers protesting for a moment. Then says, “Purgatory. I dream about Purgatory a lot.” She pauses. “Different versions of Purgatory and…anyway, Cas showed up in the dream and my brain said to go after. But it was just a dream.”

“Maybe not. Maybe it was really her. She says she’s popping into your dreams too.”

“I…really?” Dean asks, her stomach sinking. “How come I don’t remember?”

“Dunno.” Sam sighs. “I think she’s sort of hiding.” It takes Dean a moment to drag her eyes from her window and study Sam’s profile.

“Hiding,” she repeats.

Sam slows again for a stoplight and sends one hand diving into her hair, grabbing a fistful before smoothing it back out. When she speaks, it comes out in a gush.

“Look, she didn’t seem real keen on coming back.” Sam gives a loose, helpless shrug. “Both times I’ve brought it up she got bitchy. She…did something happen in Purgatory?” A heartbeat of silence.

Dean huffs through a thin smile.

“Nah,“ she touches her lips thoughtlessly, with the remainders of her right hand. “She wanted to come back. She was trying to hold on when I—” Her right hand falls into her lap, and she watches the three fingers curl in on themselves. The light changes. Sam pushes the Impala forward. Water and machinery fills the rest of the silence.

***

The library in which they spend the next day is larger than the last one but smells worse and they don’t even find vague hints at escaping Purgatory. Dean does find a passage that references _Dante’s Inferno_ , and finally remembers where the idea of suicides becoming trees came from. She tries to recall if breaking tree branches in Purgatory ever resulted in dead peoples’ voices telling her sob stories, like in the original story. She doubts it, and besides, she knows from experience that Dante got plenty of his shit wrong.

“Where next?” Dean asks that evening as they head towards the library’s exit, trying not to sound too tired or frustrated or just overall cranky.

“Mm,” Sam grunts, eyes still on some scrap of paper she grabbed from a bulletin board they passed a few seconds ago. Dean tilts to try and see it, and finds a stylized rising sun with one blinking eye.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Sam stows the paper. “There are rare book collectors in Portland we could hit up.”

“Good ole Portlandia,” Dean shrugs, shoving the doors open. “Could be worse.”

***

The motel bedroom that night is damp from the humidity and Dean’s willing to bet that the sheets will feel sticky and unwashed. So she bundles up in an extra jacket before stretching across the comforter.

Sam, for her part, dresses in her pajamas—some variation of t-shirt and flannel pants that actually fit Sam’s figure, rescued from various Goodwills and liquidation sales and kept strictly in Sam’s duffel “because you won’t appreciate them.”

After she’s dressed, Sam climbs into bed and pulls out a book and a notepad and pen. Dean watches her read and take notes for a good half hour. Nothing riveting, but it’s good to assure herself that Sam makes the same faces while reading as she did ten years ago.

At some point, Dean’s eyes slide shut, though Sam’s pen scraping against paper still reaches her, and the light still filters through her eyelids. She watches the red hue from her blood vessels.

Time stretches longer and longer, and some part of Dean’s mind compares it to those graphics of an astronaut approaching a black hole. Spaghettification, wasn’t it? The astronauts’ buddies watching him get nearer and nearer and never quite reaching the hole. Time slowing down until it might as well be frozen.

“Hey Cas.”

The voice floats in from a distance, and Dean imagines that it springs from the depths of the black hole she’s cruising towards. Maybe from behind. It’s hard to tell.

“We’re doing okay.”

The red has sifted into soft black.

“Still researching. Dean’s getting into it finally, in the past few days. That’s good.”

Dean makes some vague attempt to move, but then she remembers she’s frozen in time and it’s easier to stay sprawled across her motel bed.

“I hope you’re alive still. I’ve said this before but you shouldn’t be scared if you pop into my dreams again. Come find me, we’ll figure it out. No one’s mad at you. I’m not sure if you knew that. Same…same for Dean.”

That’s a good idea to mention that. Dean’s still not sure that Cas ever completely dropped the hand-shy dog impression.

“Stay safe.”

Dean hasn’t prayed in forever.

“Amen.”

 _You go, Sam_ , Dean wants to say. She opens her eyes instead, and finds a clearing ringed by pines. Sam’s “Amen” sighs at her from a distance, and Dean lifts her head as if to follow its path.

This is the next part, she thinks, of the black hole. The astronaut flies through the hole and sometimes he’s lucky and it’s actually a wormhole dumping him in another part of the universe, while to his friends and family he’s still stuck on the cusp of everything.

“Jesus Christ,” Dean rubs at her eyes. This is probably the result of that one time Sam was reading _A Brief History of Time_ and needed to bombard Dean with every detail.

When Dean looks around, she finds sunlight that is not so much gray as pale white.

She’s never started out here. It makes Dean’s stomach twist.

“Hey!” Dean shouts. The forest swallows her voice, as she’s come to expect but never gotten used to. She squints then picks a direction and starts walking.

“Benny!” Dean tries again. “Cas?” And just for the hell of it, “Sammy!”

Dean moves faster, aware of the emptiness in her hands and the forest’s vastness. She’s far too aware that she could run in one direction for years and never find the end of things. Black hole, Cas had said. Not the same set of rules.

“Castiel!”

She stops, stands still and tries to dredge some remnant of her own voice coming back to her. It’s not there. The forest took it.

“Fuck you too,” she tells it. Then she kicks at the leaf litter for good measure and the cacophony of rasping does not end of good for the way her heart is slamming against the walls of her ribcage.

The leaves settle again. The trees stand as tall and unforgiving as before. They might have grown. They might be making human sounds. They might change their nature halfway through and they might bleed blood rather than sap.

Dean gathers whatever moisture is left in her mouth and approaches the nearest tree. Something with shaggy bark and broad leaves that twitch at her sluggishly in a slow wind. She reaches out and grasps a slim twig, imagines the yellow-green wood beneath her fingers. She snaps it in one firm movement.

The tree remains silent and unsullied. Nothing like blood dripping from it. Dean drops the twig to her feet and stares dismally at the trees in all directions. Her brain is saying to keep moving but her body doesn’t see the point.

She might walk forever. Black holes probably don’t have ends.

Probably no ends.

Probably not.

The car jerks.

Dean nearly cries out at the sunlight hitting her eyes. Unforgiving, real-time sunlight that she hasn’t seen for the past week. Sam’s hair is silhouetted against it, flyaway and glinting with the gold that Dean never sees otherwise.

Dean’s spread across the back seat, the seat belt digging into the small of her back.

Dean tries propping herself up on her elbows but another jerk makes her forego the idea. The blanket Sam must have draped across her slips down into the well behind the driver’s seat. Sam’s head tilts back towards her, sunglasses glinting.

“Do we have another flat tire?” Dean asks.

“Potholes,” Sam assures her.

Dean absorbs this information then turns her head to bury her face into the leather of the seat. She lifts her head a second later.

“We were just in the motel. How did I get in the car?”

Sam’s head turns again. “You don’t remember?”

“No.” Dean moves to a sit with a small grunt, feeling the twinge in her back that means she’s going to ache later today if she’s not careful.

“I had to half carry you,” Sam is focused on the road again, but Dean can hear her smiling.

“Oh.” Dean looks out the window and finds a sun firmly planted at its zenith.  “How long have I been sleeping?” she asks, something dropping in her stomach.

“You crashed at around ten last night,” Sam shrugs. “Fourteen hours? I think—hey now.” Dean has thrust her head up next to Sam’s, eyes narrow.

“How long?”

“Fourteen? Maybe thirteen?”

A beat of silence as they pop over another pothole.

“Something’s wrong,” Dean says.

“That’s not a safe position.”

“No, something’s _wrong._ ” Dean starts crawling into the passenger seat despite Sam’s protestations. “Fourteen…that’s more than I sleep in an average month.”

“Not really.”

“God damn it, Sam!” Dean punctuates this with a drop into her seat. “Yes it is. This is…when did this start?”

“Uhhh,” Sam leans back in her seat, the sound coming out as a groan. “Last week you slept a whole eight hours, that one night.”

“Right, and bef—Oh hell. Witches. I bet it was that coven.”

“It wasn’t the coven.”

“Witches would totally pull something like this.”

“Okay one,” Sam lifts one finger, “they’re dead, so their spell shouldn’t hold. And two,” second finger up. “Giving you a proper night’s sleep? That’s really the essence of cold-blooded evil right there.”

Dean stares at her sister, back straightening.

“You’re making fun of me,” she says.

“I…” Sam sighs and takes off her sunglasses, squinting at Dean through the bar of sunlight that’s sending shadows of her eyelashes across her irises. “I think you’ve been through a lot of stress recently and this is your body making up for it. I wish you wouldn’t automatically assume something’s wrong.”

“It’s not _normal_ ,” Dean protests. A beat of silence. “What stress?”

“Seriously?” Sam looks down at Dean’s hand, prompting her to lift it to face height and peer at the stitched skin like it knows something she doesn’t.

“Thought you said we were done with this,” Dean says, giving her fingers an experimental twitch. The response is lukewarm.

“I said we’re out of ointment,” Sam clarifies. “You should still be having appointments and prescriptions and physical therapy sessions. But you’re refusing all that so instead you get fourteen-hour snooze session.”

“No way,” Dean rolls her eyes and drops her right hand into her lap. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting hypersomnia when they get their fingers chewed off.”

“Okay,” Sam says in a tone of voice that says I’m-not-winning-here-and-I’m-tired-of-arguing-this. Dean peers out the window again to find a forest, surprise surprise. She feels her left hand come up to rub at her right. They hit another pothole.

“What shit road are we on?” she asks.

“Somewhere in southern Oregon,” Sam says.

“Oregon needs to get its shit together,” Dean slouches in her seat and hitches her feet up so she can bump her chin against her knees. She avoids looking at the trees.

***

That afternoon, they start passing signs for some local art festival. The cute handwritten font makes Dean think of yuppies selling organic carrots and hand carved ukuleles. Which is why she really can’t fake being surprised when Sam sidles up to her at the gas station, flyer in hand.

Dean is leaned up against Baby, listening to the gas flow beside her, wondering how the clouds moved in so quickly. The flyer appears in her line of sight, flapping slightly in a damp breeze. Dean peers at it and finds a familiar illustration of a rising sun with a single eye peering from it.

“Really?” Dean pushes hair from her eyes so she can look at Sam properly. Sam widens her eyes and does a remarkable impression of her five-year-old self, height notwithstanding. “Why?” Dean asks.

“Why not?”

“Thought we were researching for Cas.”

“This is researching,” Sam pulls the flyer away, folds it up and stows it in her jacket pocket. “I was talking to the guy at the motel front desk this morning. Apparently there’s people selling old tomes and grimoires. There might be something.”

“Oh god,” Dean pulls away from the car as the gas hitches to a stop. “I thought I trained you better than that.”

Sam’s face screws up. “No, I know most of it’s bogus,” she says, and Dean hears a touch of embarrassment. “I’m just…it’s worth looking.”

“So it’s to that point, is it?” Dean unhooks the nozzle from Baby, a little clumsy with her left hand, but she manages all the same. “If we’re running that low on options, you should tell me and not run after a bunch of glitter sniffers.”

Sam exhales hard and looks to the right, hands ramming into her jacket pockets. Dean screws in the gas cap before glancing up to find Sam glaring at her.

“It’s worth looking,” Sam repeats. Her lips tighten. “We don’t have any jobs right now anyway.”

Oh. Ouch. Dean tries to smile, but she suspects her expression better resembles a grimace.

“Y’know what, not like I can call the shots,” she throws her hands up and moves towards the Impala’s passenger door. “I’m not the one driving, am I?” She raises her eyebrows at Sam before sliding into her seat. Sam joins her a moment later and if that isn’t classic bitch face, Dean doesn’t know what is.

***

They find the festival an hour later.

“This is bullshit.”

“Dean.”

“It is.”

“Just stay civil for, like, three hours. We’ll make it quick. In and out.”

“What’s this then?”

Sam looks down at the little wooden figurine she’s practically fondling. Some kind of bear caught in mid-roar. The bearded guy at the back of the tent is watching them a little too closely for Dean’s comfort.

“It’s cute,” Sam replaces the bear and turns away, but Dean can see the pink tingeing the tips of her ears.

“Adorable,” Dean follows her out of the tent, and finds another whiff of pot. “Okay so.” She claps her hands together, and still can’t get used to the unbalanced sensation the missing fingers create. “Tomes. Where are they?”

“Probably…” Sam pulls a many-times-folded slip of paper from her pocket with the booths listed. “Um, let’s try Reader’s Row— _don’t_ pull that face.”

“I’m not pulling a face,” Dean lies as she looks away from the troupe of Renaissance performers with—she swears—cogs and gears on their clothes. She turns and she plows forward. “C’mon, I’m starting to get high from the fumes here.”

Reader’s Row, as the name might suggest, is a double line of tents and booths devoted to reading material. Much of it is boxes upon boxes of used books, most of them the Nora Roberts and Harlequin variety.

“Hey Sammy, this one looks like you,” Dean calls across one tent, while Sam is asking a shawl-clad woman about copies of pre-Islamic texts. Sam predictably ignores her, but Dean grins down anyway at the cover featuring a tall, lanky brunette caught up in the ardent hold of her lover. Dean kind of wants to buy the book just for the dude’s 1980s porn star moustache.

She keeps digging through the box, and is rewarded by a cover—“Animal Heat”—that features a dirty blonde woman and a man with cat ears, but she’s not convinced the face matches hers.

“D’you think this looks like me?” Dean asks Sam as her sister approaches. Sam squints at the book.

“I didn’t realize boobs that big could be that perky,” she deadpans, and Dean snorts.

“It’s about…I _think_ a chick having sex with a cat man. I’m pretty sure the laws of physics are out the window. Anything?”

“Not really.” Sam glances to the front of the tent, where a sliver of gray sky can be seen. “She said we could try the guy a few tents down.”

“Let’s do it,” Dean dumps the books back in their box and starts for the entrance. Sam follows sluggishly.

The air has definitely dampened since earlier today, and Dean smells a thunderstorm coming on. She wonders if the festival-goers planned for it.

As they scoot past an impromptu jam session—“Hey, you’re in the middle of the road here,”—Dean wonders what Castiel would say to all this. She can just imagine the expressions, the questions. ‘Why is that man asking to read my palm? The lines on my hand have nothing to do with me. That’s definitely not from the 12th century, I’d guess the 19th.’

“What’s so funny?” Sam asks. Dean drops the grin, takes a few more steps, then shrugs.

“It’d be fun to bring Cas to something like this,” she tries. Silence comes from behind her for the next few steps.

“We’d argue about organic food and Cas would just watch us. With that one look.” Dean nods, envisioning this almost too perfectly.

“I’d try to get her to smoke a joint and you’d start lecturing,” she contributes.

“And then she’d start telling us about how she remembers when people first discovered drugs,” Sam answers.

“I bet Gabriel had something to do with it,” Dean lifts her head slightly and finds herself grinning into the watery sun. Sam’s shoulder bumps hers, or maybe she’s just stepping into Dean to avoid a group of chattering girls in dreads and long skirts.

The tent to which the shawled woman pointed them does not have any boxes of used paperbacks. It doesn’t have much of anything, besides a man with a salt-and-pepper beard and rheumy eyes beneath glasses that had to have come from the ‘70s.

“Hi,” Sam approaches him, and Dean follows half a step behind. “You’re Sean Forell?”

“I am,” the man shifts on his stool and puts down the library-laminated book he’d been reading. Dean glances down and sees the name “Kurt Vonnegut.” She perks up.

“I’m Sam, this is Dean,” Sam gestures. “We’re looking for some vintage books? Grace Miersen said you specialize in them.”

“Sure, sure,” Sean nods. He looks between Sam and Dean, though not with anything bordering unfriendliness. Dean decides to call it curiosity. “Y’know watcher lookin’ for?” Sam nods.

“The main one we want is called ‘The Purge of the Soul.’ Um, not sure who originally wrote it, but it was copied in the Congregation of St. Vanne in 17th century France. Translated and republished in 1842 in London.”

“Y’know the publisher?”

“Lowell and Trentin.”

“Mm,” Sean rubs at his beard. “I’ve heard of Lowell an’ Trentin sure ‘nuff.” He reaches down and pulls a battered laptop from his bag. “Lemme check through the inventory. Anything else you want to me to look fer?”

Dean leans back on her heels as Sam rattles off three more titles, familiar now that she’d heard them six or seven times.

“Yep, I have two of ‘em. ‘Purge of the Soul’ an’ the anthology by Abdul Manaf,” Sean nods, tapping at the laptop with one stout finger. “I c’n sell ‘em to you in a package deal. $850 total?”

“That’s—” Sam glances over at Dean, and pauses at the expression she finds there. “How about…I get your business card and I’ll call you later.”

“It’s a good deal,” Sean insists. “Those books aren’t usually found in public collections.”

“We’ve noticed,” Dean steps in. “And we’ll discuss it. Thanks.” Sean looks over Dean, then grunts noncommittally and reaches into his pocket for a handful of business cards. He hands one to Sam and touches a hand to the brim of his cap.

“Thanks fer stopping by,” he tells them, as Sam pockets the card.

“We could swing it,” Sam says as soon as they exit from the tent. “That’s a few good nights of hustling, it wouldn’t be impossible.”

“It wouldn’t,” Dean frowns into the middle distance, mentally cataloguing how much ammunition and food $850 could buy. It’s silly, really. They’ve done well the last few years keeping enough money and illegal credit cards in circulation to where they don’t necessarily have to skip meals anymore. Sam still had a face full of acne the last time Dean really had to shoplift. Still.

“Let’s shop it out,” Dean shrugs her jacket further over her shoulders. “A little haggling’s probably normal here.”

But another hour of asking around results in little more than vague suggestions to try someone else. One booth has one of the books in question, but charges nearly twice Sean’s price.

By the time they’ve exhausted Reader’s Row and a few other booths besides, the festival is awash in a strange, murky sunset. Dean and Sam huddle between a booth selling handmade gardening tools and a tent full of alpaca scarves to review their options.

“I mean,” Sam squints at the festival directory with what little light she can gather from the lanterns starting to flicker on. “Maybe we can get him to talk the price down.”

“Maybe I can threaten him,” Dean suggests.

“Maybe you shouldn’t get security called on us.”

“Maybe a bunch of hippies don’t have security for their peace and love party.”

Sam putters her lips and stows the paper again. “Let’s get the money from the car. We need those books and the libraries aren’t helping.”

“We haven’t been to the California collections yet,” Dean tries.

“It’s gonna take another week to cull through all those,” Sam points out, and a fast wind spins her hair above her head. “They’re here, the guy’s selling. So we don’t make any more big purchases this next month, big deal.”

“Big deal my ass,” Dean scowls. “That’s $850.”

“It’s _Cas_ ,” Sam’s face screws into one of incredulity. “You saying Cas isn’t worth a few hundred dollars?”

“’Course I’m not,” Dean throws her shoulders back.

“Sounds like it,” Sam has to raise her voice over the wind. “Y’know now would be a great time for you to pretend you give a shit,” she says.

“What?”

Sam wipes a hand across her face and plows forward.

“Something happened in Purgatory and no one wants to tell me, that’s fine. But Cas is over there telling me she can’t come back and you’re over here acting like you don’t care and it’s—“ Sam inhales in a sharp stream, hands flexing. “It’s bullshit and I shouldn’t have to drag both of you behind me.”

“I’m just trying to be practical,” Dean tries around a rumble of thunder.

“You’re avoiding something because that’s what you fucking do,” Sam seems to grow taller, and her hair wilder. “What happened in Purgatory? Why are you and Cas so bent on keeping her there?”

“How should I know?” Dean snaps. “Why the hell were _you_ so bent on keeping us there a few months ago?”

Sam’s face crashes through at least four different reactions, and she turns away before Dean can see what it settles on.

“Stay here,” she says, her voice nearly drowned out by the wind whipping past tents. “I’m getting the money.”

Dean watches her jog away, a slim shadow with her jacket pulled over her head. The rain starts a second later.

“Well screw this,” Dean says, and starts in the opposite direction, looking for a tent that looks like it’s not about to fly away.

She ends up in the one with the thick, savory smell surrounding it, which makes sense given she’s had nothing but a bag of Funyuns since she woke up. Dean hesitates just inside the tent’s entrance, wondering how much these people are going to charge for their organic shtick. Her stomach, until recently complacent, starts to gurgle.

Dean sighs, imagining how much longer it will be until the nearest diner—the miles of farmland they passed through earlier didn’t look promising. A fresh gust of wind spackles cold rainwater across Dean’s back, and that drives her further into the tent.

It’s a sturdy looking place, at least. The poles and cords look industrial rather than handmade, and they even have a fire pit in the middle and electric lights strung along the ceiling. It’s enough light to see the rows of picnic benches near Dean’s end of the tent, and the kitchen equipment further down. Damn it, it smells good.

Trying to appear casual, Dean seats herself at the edge of the eating area, at a table with a paper cup and plate still remaining. She folds her arms and curls in slightly against the cold.

Sam will call in a bit. Dean will tell her to just buy the books and save enough money to get them some food before they hit the road. Sam will enjoy the soy vegan stuff a little too much, Dean will solider through a veggie burger because she’s a trooper, and they’ll leave all this behind them within an hour.

Dean shivers because the wind is really biting through her clothes, and wonders if she can score a spot by the fire pit. After assessing the situation for a moment, Dean wanders over and finds a tolerable spot between a couple fiercely eating each other’s lips off and a group of girls sharing a pipe. The fire is well-stoked, and Dean braces her elbows on her knees to hold her hands to it.

“Wanna puff?”

Dean turns to find one of the girls, mousy brown hair arranged into two thick pigtails. The pipe’s contents reach Dean in an unmistakable whiff.

“Um.” Dean cracks her lips apart into a smile. “Nah, thanks though.”

“Mm hm,” the girl shrugs and sticks the pipe’s stem into her mouth with a click of teeth against enamel.

Dean pulls her cell phone from her pocket and checks the screen. No missed calls. Dean crosses her arms and stares into the fire, trying to let her shoulders relax. It’s been forever since she’s stared into a fire. Last time she did this Benny and Cas were sitting on either side of her, arguing about some stupid shit Dean can’t remember now for the life of her. But she remembers that it was just enough like having Sam and Bobby around that she didn’t had any reason to stop them. Only difference is that this fire gives her heat, probably follows all the right laws of thermodynamics.

When Dean rouses herself, she checks her phone again and finds that fifteen minutes have passed with no calls from Sam. Dean tries to mentally gauge how long it takes to buy a few books, then jabs at her speed dial anyway.

The girls with the pipe burst into laughter. Dean stands up and strides over to the tent’s entrance before calling again. Voicemail.

It’s stupid. It really is. But Dean’s chest is constricting anyway, and she’s trying to remember whether or not Sam has some form of weapon to protect herself from…anything.

Dean shoves her phone into her pocket and aims for the general direction of the parking lot.

Navigating the festival in the rain, in the dark, is swiftly making the whole thing climb higher and higher on Dean’s mental list of “dumbass ideas Sam’s had.” If Sam ends up being kidnapped because of this, Dean’s going to give her shit about this for the next few months.

At one point she ducks into an empty tent and calls three times in a row, getting voicemail each time. The bands around her chest tighten.

When she finally finds the parking lot—or, the vast field that counts as a parking lot—Dean almost doesn’t see Sam. But as she approaches the Impala, there she is, silhouetted in the driver’s seat an open book visibly propped against the steering wheel. Dean makes some sound—she’s unsure what it is exactly—and slams on the glass hard enough to jar her elbow. Sam jumps, and Dean’s fairly sure her head hits the ceiling.

“You weren’t answering you phone,” Dean growls through the glass, then rounds the car to yank the passenger door open, already tirading. "What the ever living hell was that about?” she demands. “You lose your phone? Or did it run out of battery? Goddamn, Sam, you know—“

“The signal’s shitty out here,” Sam interrupts, one hand still rubbing the top of her head. Dean squelches into the passenger seat and glares at her sister. “Look I’m sorry,” Sam holds out a hand. “I knew you’d get over here eventually.”

Dean doesn’t say anything for several seconds, the rain hammering above their heads. She wonders how it’s fair that one stubborn, too-tall, nerdy kid is allowed to have this much sway over her well being.

“You buy the books?” Dean finally asks.

“Ordered them,” Sam says. “We’re going to pick them up from his store in Portland.”

“K,” Dean tugs at the damp denim clinging to her skin. “Let’s get out of here.”

Sam sighs and turns the ignition. They roll down rows of dimly lit cars, the rain hashing across their vision.

Dean flexes her right hand and feels the cold muscles respond even more sluggishly than usual. She hopes her whole hand doesn’t seize up, and tucks it under her thigh just to be safe. The tattered nerve endings zing painfully at her. She looks up to find Sam watching.

“It okay?” Sam asks.

“Fine.”

“Is the feeling still there.”

“Yes.”

Sam turns onto the narrow highway road and pushes the car faster.

“Has the feeling been disappearing at all?”

“What?” Dean gives a side eye.

“Feeling in your hand. Has it been staying the same, increasing or decreasing?”

“Why the interrogation?”

“Just checking.”

“If my hand falls off, I’ll let you know.” Dean twists around in her seat and watches rain streak across her black window like tadpoles or sperm. Sam sighs again behind her.

***

They find a motel just outside Portland and somehow manage to not speak to one another during the whole process of checking in and hauling their stuff into the room. Dean takes a hot shower in an attempt to warm up, and when she emerges from the bathroom, Sam is already in bed, back to her.

Dean changes into clean clothes and spends a solid ten minutes flexing her right hand, examining the skin and muscle movement as if to find hints of decay. It’s ugly. Abruptly, she stuffs it beneath her pillow and lets her head drop on top of it. She stares across the dim room to where Sam lies, probably not asleep yet.

Dean doesn’t expect to fall asleep either, but then the shadows of the room turn into the shadows made by arching branches much too easily.

It’s that _other_ place again. It’s not like Dean has any clear memory of these things, but she’s inclined to think that she hasn’t been in regular Purgatory for a long time.

Dean twists around and finds the clearest looking path through the trees. She heaves a deep sigh that touches the bottom of her lungs and starts walking.

When she stops again, she has a stitch in her side and her lips are cracking. She twists around. For a second she thinks that she’s moved a few feet. Then she decides she must have gone farther than that. And then her muscles fail her and she sinks to her knees and it doesn’t matter, does it?

Dean’s hands fall into the soil. Bits of wood bite into the flesh of her palms. And because she remembers this from last time, Dean hands dives her fingers into the loam.

She nearly cries for how familiar and comforting the soil feels. She doesn’t waste time. Her arms are swallowed up by the ground before she can blink, and her legs are well on their way. She buries her face into the leaf litter and inhales like a dying woman.

A whiff of heavy perfume touches at her nose.

Dean blinks sluggishly, then tilts her face away from the ground. It’s hard, with her body mostly engulfed in soil, but she still manages to see the clearing. Manages to see the flowers.

Dean stares dumbly, because it’s like seeing a panda bear in the QuikMart parking lot, it’s so ridiculous. But yeah, flowers. Their colors are muted, but it’s still _colors_. The smell is intense but it also reminds Dean of the time Sam dragged them into one botanical garden or anther in the middle of spring. Something violently alive. It’s convincing enough for Dean to rock her body forward.

She can’t move her hands. They’ve stiffened.

Dean pauses but keeps staring at the flowers. Then she frowns because they’ve flowed toward her.

Like a viscous river, the riot of black-eyed susans, lavender, forget-me-nots, creep across the forest floor. The blooms spring up sedately; their colors are definitely dimmer than what Dean would find on Earth, but it far outshines anything from Purgatory.

Dean twitches her feet, but they’ve become immobile too.

A lump rises from the flowers. Dean lifts her head as far as possible and finds a mess of brown hair and a shoulder and hips. It’s Sam. Sleeping in that field of flowers like a Disney princess. Figures as much. Dean lets her head sink a little, but keeps her eyes trained on her sister. Or, the thing that looks like her sister. She’s not willing to bet on anything here.

The flowers reach Dean and flow around her. A marigold unfolds inches from her face, and a green leaf brushes Dean’s eyelash. Dean wonders if she could open her mouth and let the flowers move inside.

A terrible shout tears the scene in half.

Dean wrenches her eyes open and is halfway across the space between her and Sam’s beds before she’s aware that she’s awake.

Sam’s curled up in a ball. It’s a bad sign when Sam’s in a ball. It’s when her knobby limbs look painfully contorted and Dean imagines she could hold all that her sister is in one armful, which is wrong on too many levels.

“Hey,” Dean crawls onto the bed, blindly feeling with her right hand. “Sam.” Sam flinches and makes that sound again. It reminds Dean of the souls that split open beneath her knife back in Hell.

Dean finds a shoulder, a mess of hair, then an ear and a squinched eye. Sam is turned away from her, so Dean climbs over her, keeping one hand on Sam’s face.

“Hey,” she repeats. Sometimes she can wake Sam up with quiet words, but this isn’t one of those nights. Sam keeps making those wet noises, body tightening into unnatural shapes. “Sam!” Dean changes tactics, jostling at her sister’s shoulder. “C’mon man, it’s a dream. You’re going to wake everyone up. Sam!”

A choked sound. “Cas,” Sam’s voice is rough around the name.

And it’s only natural, Dean will tell herself in a few minutes, that she should grab both sides of Sam’s face and stare into it with her heart racing.

“Cas?” she nearly shouts. “Cas, are you in there with her?” Inhale. “Cas, you need to help her, buddy. She’s hurting and…” Dean looks up into the fuzzy darkness and her grip on Sam’s face tightens. “Cas, if you can hear this you need to find a way into this dream pronto. I…fuck, Cas, for Sammy if no one else.”

Dean waits, running her thumbs across Sam’s eyelids in some attempt to get them to relax. Sam keeps breathing too hard and making wet noises, arms tangled in with her legs and Dean might be muttering things to Sam, interwoven with prayers at Cas, and she keeps waiting for Sam’s eyes to open and reveal the brilliant fire of Castiel’s Grace.

That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that Sam goes limp after ten long minutes. Her breathing still comes in gusts, but her body loses its tension in increments. Legs uncurl, eyelids relax, brow unfurrows.

Dean exhales in a single stream, then on impulse leans forward to press her lips against Sam’s sweating forehead.

“It’s okay,” she mutters against the hot skin there. “We’ve got you, yeah? You’re fine.”

Another fifteen minutes pass, and Dean is already edging into dozing off when she realizes that she has two hazel eyes trained on her.

Dean rouses herself and shifts her hand down to grip at Sam’s shoulder.

“How bad?” she asks.

“I uh…” Sam blinks heavily. “I’ve had worse.” A pause. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you—“

“Shut it,” Dean presses down on Sam’s shoulder.

“Cas was there.”

“Yeah?” Dean can feel her mouth curling into a smile.

“Mm,” Sam inhales in three hitched breaths. “She showed up like…all white knight. She got the...she got everything to leave.”

“That sounds like her,” Dean says. They remain silent another several minutes, Sam’s breathing slowing and her skin cooling.

“You guys get to talk?” Dean asks, pitching her voice low.

“She didn’t want to stay.”

Dean hums noncommittally.

“What’s she doing, really?” Sam asks, and her voice comes out all kinds of weary. “Why’s she hiding from us?”

Dean’s eyes rest on her right hand, and she doesn’t say anything.

***

They pick up their purchase from Sean’s overly smiling clerk the next morning, exiting the tiny store with a bundle of brown paper. Sam is practically vibrating.

They find a Starbucks a few blocks away, and Dean orders a bagel and two coffees while Sam tears open the paper at the table in the corner. The man behind the counter watches Dean’s right hand a few seconds too long, but Dean can’t find it in her to be pissed or embarrassed by it.

“I think this was worth the money,” Sam says as soon as Dean lands in the seat across from her, scooting the bagel into the middle of the table and within Sam’s reach. “This—here, listen to this. ‘The world of Purgatory resides in half-truths and shadows. In this place no laws of the universe remain true to themselves, and monsters stalk the unfortunate soul through all hours.’” Sam glances up, eyes wide. Dean forces down a swallow of coffee.

“Yup,” she says. “Sounds spot on. Here,” she gestures. “Gimme the other book.” Sam slides it to her, a dull green affair that, Dean is certain, smells like old paper and mild mold.

They sit at the Starbucks for the greater part of the day, Dean ordering coffee or a pastry every once in a while to stave off pointed looks. Somewhere around mid-afternoon, Sam’s hand shoots out and grabs at Dean’s wrist. Dean starts to tug it back, then stills at the expression on her sister’s face.

“We got it,” Sam tells her, voice higher than usual. “Incantation. How to pull a being from Purgatory. Instructions and everything.”

“Oh,” Dean manages.

“This is manageable,” Sam is still speaking. “I mean, it’s designed for a monster but we can do this.” She finally lifts her face from the book. “Dean, we can do this.”

Dean’s not sure what her expression looks like, but it must be hesitant enough to elicit Sam’s eyes narrowing. For a few seconds, Dean’s sure that Sam’s going to say something, but instead she shuts the book and stands.

“C’mon, I bet we can get most of these ingredients in town.”

Dean follows Sam out of the Starbucks massaging her right hand compulsively.

***

Dean is not surprised anymore to open her eyes and find the forest. Just forest. No Benny and no Leviathan. No Castiel or Sam or flowers.

Sometimes, Dean suspects she herself might not be there.

She still moves forward though. She keeps an eye out, but she never does find anything but forest. She’s careful not to lie down again.

“Oy.”

“Jesus—“

Dean stares up with blurred eyes. Sam’s standing next to the Impala, leaning down through the open car door. Her face is drawn.

“Was I asleep again?” Dean asks.

“Um. Yes.”

“How—“ Dean peers at a setting sun. “Was I asleep all day?”

“Kinda.”

“And you didn’t think to wake me up?” Dean demands, trying to clamp down on the panic rising through her. She can’t for the life of her remember falling asleep.

“I tried,” Sam argues, shifting so that the plastic shopping bag in her hand rustles. “But you said you were going to close your eyes for a few minutes and you were out.”

Dean rubs at her eyes, watching red splotches explode across her vision.

“This is bad,” she says.

“Maybe you want to go to a doctor?”

Dean shoots Sam a dirty look, then gestures to the bag. “That for the incantation?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Sam is still watching Dean too closely. “I think we can do it in a few days, once I tweak it.” A long beat of silence. “Dean, are you sure you don’t want to go see a—“

“No.” Dean fixes her gaze out the windshield. It takes a minute, but Sam finally rounds the car and gets into the driver’s seat.

Dean watches the scenery pass for several minutes. She nearly doesn’t believe it when her eyelids start to grow heavy. Blinking hard, she straightens and after a moment of thought, digs her fingernails into the flesh of her palm.

“Hey,” Sam says after a few minutes. “You’re bleeding.”

Dean looks down and finds a single stream of vivid crimson pulsing across her fingers. She wipes it off on her jeans and avoids Sam’s eyes. Everything in her body is crying for rest.

“I’m going to fucking fall asleep again,” Dean says. Her throat tightens.

“It’s okay,” Sam tries. It’s not okay. It’s the furthest thing from okay, and Sam damn well knows it, but it’s Sam’s job to be collected while Dean’s throat becomes a pinhole.

“Hey,” Sam’s hand comes out and grabs at Dean’s arm. “I’m going to do some research. We’re going to figure out why this is happening.”

“You and research,” Dean murmurs. Her mind is growing fuzzy at the edges. It’s not fair to Sam, she considers, to be so close to getting Cas back and losing Dean at the same time.

“Gonna close my eyes,” Dean says.

She never hears Sam’s answer.

***

It sets a pattern for the next few days. Sam drives while Dean sleeps like she’s been drugged. The days become jumpy and uncountable, and it gets to the point that Dean has two modes: that-place-that’s-Purgatory-but-different, and Sam.

The waking side, the Sam side, is full of her sister asking if she feels all right and giving worried looks and making sure that she eats something before becoming unconscious for another few hours. Dean stops asking how long she’s sleeping, though she’s sure that Sam is keeping a tally. And judging by the wrinkles settling into Sam’s brow, it’s not good. Sam doesn’t mention the doctor again, but Dean’s just waiting for the time that she’ll wake up in a hospital bed.

And then…that place. All trees and maddening silence.

Sometimes, when she’s very, very lucky Dean will find patches of memory of Benny, her and Cas fighting their way towards the portal. More often, it’s Dean stumbling through eons of forest.

Dean keeps an eye out for Cas. Not the dream-memory version, but the real one. You never know.

If she could find Castiel again, Dean would ask questions. Proper questions. Like whether all this sleeping means Dean is dying. Whether that metaphor for a black hole is appropriate, because sometimes Dean swears she can feel herself being sucked into it, stretching longer and longer, her sense of time distorted while Sam watches from above. Whether Cas can forgive her for letting go of her in Purgatory. Right when it had mattered, she had let go of her.

The forest never yields Cas, or the flowers or Sam again, though. Just trees that never know what species they are and might or might not be the remnants of those who didn’t find enough reason to keep living. Sometimes Dean will press her hand, her forehead against their trunks and strain to hear _something_. Sometimes she wonders whether she’ll turn herself into a tree right then and there, and whether she’ll wake up for Sam ever again. She still remembers the soil. It tugs at her.

“No,” Dean tells herself out loud, her voice disappearing as soon as it leaves her mouth. “You need to wake up.”

The Impala hums at her from a distance.

Dean opens her eyes to find her head resting in Sam’s lap. Sam’s torso rises in front of her like a wall, and her breathing is visible. Dean can feel Sam’s thigh muscles beneath her head, along with the distant reverberations of Sam’s pulse, and she knows that if Sam speaks, Dean will hear her voice from that wonderful angle, bigger and more sonorous and able to be felt as well as heard.

She’s glad she didn’t become a tree.

“Hey.” A hand comes to rest on her head, and Dean tilts her face up enough to find Sam looking down at her from an odd angle. Her mouth is smiling but her eyes are bloodshot.

“Hey,” Dean’s mouth feels like something died in it. She’ll ask for some water in a bit.

“You okay?” Sam asks.

“I…” Dean frowns. “I can’t remember when I was last awake.” Sam exhales.

“Two days ago,” she says. A beat of silence.

“Am I dying?” Dean asks. Because if she can’t ask Castiel, Sam might know.

“I hope not,” Sam replies. She visibly hesitates before continuing, “I’ve been making some calls. There are a few things we can try, to see if we can keep you awake.”

“Mm,” Dean grunts, tilting her head forward until her forehead is pressed against Sam’s stomach.

“The incantation for Cas?” she asks.

“On hold.”

“I can wait,” Dean says abruptly. “Get Cas first.”

“Why—“

“Cas can help,” Dean mutters. “Be easier than trying buncha ideas. ‘Sides, she’s been stuck in Purgatory longer than me.”

“She doesn’t want to come home though,” Sam says, and even though Dean can’t see her, her voice sounds dangerously close to cracking.

“We’ll have to talk…talk to her…”

“Dean?”

“Just…sorry.”

“Dean!”

The forest rises before her. Sam’s voice is lost.

Dean assesses her surroundings and starts walking while she still has the fresh memory of Sam to drive her.

It’s another empty expanse. Dean walks for decades, just like she did last time she was here.

Whenever Dean pauses on the loamy soil, she swears she can feel a prickling on her skin that must be roots extending from her body and seeking dark earth. She always tolerates it for a few seconds before moving forward again and calling Sam to mind. Sam would never find her if Dean became a confused tree in Purgatory. She should keep walking.

Dean starts to think maybe she hasn’t woken up since lying in Sam’s lap. Perhaps she’s been sleeping for days, or weeks, and Sam has lain her on a bed in some abandoned home and is watching her now, waiting for eyes to open again. Dean’s heart aches for her, because Sam shouldn’t have to go through that too.

Dean is tired. So damn tired. She wants to lie down just for a minute, just to have a change from the walking and the need to keep moving.

She never remembers when she let her knees crash into the ground.

***

When Dean swims back into awareness of herself, she is lying eagle-spread on the forest floor. Like she’s about to make a snow angel. Her legs slope into the soil. Dean twitches them experimentally and finds them viscous and unresponsive. It will hurt to yank them out and stand up. Dean closes her eyes to gather her resolve, and her eyeballs feel hot.

“Sam,” she croaks. “Sam this is shit.”

She needs to stand up. She needs to keep going, but the forest’s infinite point of mass spreads her out so thin that she doesn’t know if she can do it.

Dean wonders what it will be like to be a tree in her own dreams. A dream within a dream. Who wrote that? Or did it come from a movie? Her skin hurts. The shadows are too oppressive, the silence too loud, the earth too insistent, her roots too deeply grown, and she’s thought about a lot of ways she could die, but this wasn’t ever one of them.

she’s so heavy

…

…

heavy

this must be the event horizon

…

…

…

..

.


End file.
